Classic Audiobook Collection - Unicorns by James Huneker ~ Full Audiobook [speeches]

Starting point is 00:00:00 Unicorns by James Hunaker Chapter 1 In Praise of Unicorns The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown The Lion beat the unicorn all round the town In the Golden Book of Witt and Wisdom Through the Looking Glass, the unicorn rather disdainfully remarks that he had believed children to be fabulous monsters.

Starting point is 00:00:21 Alice smilingly retorts, Do you know, I always thought unicorns were fabulous monsters too? I never saw one alive before. Well, now that we have seen each other, said the unicorn, if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain? Yes, if you like, said Alice. No such ambiguous bargains are needed to demonstrate the existence of unicorns, that is, not for imaginative people. A mythical monster, a heraldic animal, he figures in the dictionary as the monoceros, Habitat, India, and he is the biblical Uris sporting one horn, a goat beard, and a lion's tail. He may be all of these things for practical

Starting point is 00:01:01 persons. No man is a genius to his wife. But Mogher that, he is something more for dreamers of dreams, though not the hippogriff, with its liberating wings, volplaining through the fourth dimension of space, nor yet is he tender Ondin, spirit of fountains, of whom the unicorn asked, by the waters of what valley has jealous mankind hidden the source of your secrets? Cousin, into the centaur of Maurice de Gran. He can speak in like cadence. Alice, with her dreaming eyes of wonder, was, after the manner of little girls, somewhat pragmatic. She believed in unicorns only when she saw one. Yet we must believe without such proof. As not the book of Job put this question, canst thou bind the unicorn with his band, in the furrow? As if a harnessed unicorn would be

Starting point is 00:01:50 credible. We prefer placing the charming monster with the prancing tiny hooves of surely Chopin set him to musical notation in his capricious second etude in F. Chopin, who, if man were soulless, would have endowed him with one. In the same category as the chimera of the temptation of St. Anthony, which thus taunted the Sphinx. I am light and joyous. I offer the eyes of men dazzling perspectives with paradise in the clouds above. I seek for new perfumes, for vaster flowers, for pleasures never felt before. With unicorns, we feel the nostalgia of the infinite, the sorcery of dolls, the salt of sex, the vertigo of them that skirt the edge of perilous ravines, or straddle the rim of finer issues.

Starting point is 00:02:38 He dwells in equivocal twilights, and he can stare the sun out of countenance. The enchanting unicorn boasts no favored zone. He runs around the globe. He is of all ages and climbs. He knows that fantastic land of Gautier, which contains all the divine lost land. landscapes ever painted and whose inhabitants are the lovely figures created by art in granite, marble, or wood, on walls, canvas, or crystal. Be times he flashes by the nymph in the break, and dazzled, she sighs with desire. Milor May set him to cryptic harmonies and placed him in a dim,

Starting point is 00:03:15 rich forest, though he called him a fawn, a fawn in retortion. Like the apocryphal Sadhusag in Flaubert's cosmic drama of dreams, which bore 74 hollow antlers, from which issued music of ineffable sweetness, our unicorn sings ravishing melodies for those who possess the inner ear of mystics and poets. When angered, he echoes the seven thunders of the apocalypse, and we hear of desperate rumors of fire, flood, and disaster. And he haunts those ivory gates of sleep whence come ineffable dreams to mortals. He has always fought with the lion for the crown,

Starting point is 00:03:53 and he is always defeated, but invariably claims the victory. The crown is art, and the lion, being a realist born, is only attracted by its glitter, not the symbol. The unicorn, an idealist, divines the inner meaning of this precious fillet of gold. Art is the modern philosopher's stone, and the most brilliant jewel in this much-contested crown. Eternal is the conflict of the real and the ideal, Aristotle and Plato, Alice and the unicorn, the practical and the poetic, butterflies and geese, and rare roast beef versus the impossible blue rose.

Starting point is 00:04:33 And neither the lion nor the unicorn has yet fought the battle decisive. Perhaps the day may come when, weariness invading their very bones, they may realize that they are as different sides of the same coveted shield. Matter and spirit, the multitude and the individual. Then unlock the ivory tower, abolish the tyrannies of superannual, superstitions and give the people vision without which they perish the divine rights of humanity no longer of kingly cabbages the dust of the future is washed with the silver of hope the lion and the unicorn in a single yoke strength and beauty should represent the fusion of the ideal and the real there should be no anarchy no socialism no brotherhood or sisterhood of mankind just the

Starting point is 00:05:20 millennium of sense and sentiment. What title shall we give that far away time, that longed-for utopia? With Alice and the Fawn, we forget names, so let us follow her method, when in doubt, and exclaim, here then, here then. Morose and disillusioned souls may cry aloud, ah, to see behind us no longer on the lake of eternity the implacable wake of time. Nevertheless, we must believe in the reality of our unicorn. He is Pan, he is puck, he is show, Shelly, he is Ariel, he is whim, he is irony, and he can boast with Emerson. I am owner of the sphere, of the seven stars and the solar year, of Caesar's hand and Plato's brain, of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain.

Starting point is 00:06:09 End of chapter one, read by Olivia. Chapter 2 of Unicorns, this is the Bravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Unicorns by James Hunaker, Chapter 2. An American composer, The Passing of Edward McDowell, whom the God's love. Admowers of Edward McDowell's sonata, Trajica,

Starting point is 00:06:50 may recall the last movement in which, after a triumphant climax, the curtain falls on tragic misery. It was the very Greek-like belief of McDowell that nothing is more sublimely awful than to heighten the darkness of tragedy by making it follow closely on the heels of triumph. This he accomplished in his first sonata, and fate has ironically transposed. to the life of its composer, the cruel and tragic drama of his own music. Despite occasional days, brightened by afflitting hope, the passing of Edward McDowell has begun. He is no longer an earth-dweller.

Starting point is 00:07:38 His body is here, but his brain elsewhere, not mad, not melancholy, not sunken in the stupor of indifference, his mind is translated to a region where serenity, even happiness, dwells. It is doubtless the temporary arrest of the dread mental melody before it plunges its victims into darkness. Luckily, with the advent of that last phase, the body will also succumb, and the most poetic composer of music in America be for us,

Starting point is 00:08:17 but a fragrant memory. Irony is a much abused word, yet does it not seem the very summit of pitiless irony for a man of McDowell's musical and intellectual equipment and physical health to be stricken down at the moment when after the hard study of 25 years, he has, as the expression goes, found himself and the gods were good to him.

Starting point is 00:08:47 too good at his cradle poetry and music presided he was a born tone poet yet also the painter's eye and the interior vision of the seer a mystic and a realist the practical sight of his nature was shown by his easy grasp of the techniques of pianoforte playing he had a large muscular hand with a formidable grip on the keyboard. Much has been said of the idealist McDowell, but this young man who had in his veins, Scotch, Irish, and English blood loved athletic sports, loved like Hazlitt, a fast and furious boxing match. The call of his soul won him for music and poetry.

Starting point is 00:09:44 Otherwise, he could have been a sea captain, a soldier, or an explorer in faraway countries. He had the physique. He had the big, manly spirit. We are grateful, selfishly grateful, considering his life's tragedy, that he became a composer. Here again in all this abounding vitality, the irony of the skies is manifest, never a dissipated man without a touch of the improvidence we ascribe to genius a practical moralist rare in any social condition moderate in his tastes though not a puritan he nevertheless has been mowed down by the ruthless reaper of souls as if his were negligible clay but he was reckless of the most precious part of him his brain he killed that organ by overwork not for gain the money-getting ideal and this man were widely asunder but for the love of teaching for the love of sharing with others the treasures in his overflowing storehouse and primarily for the love of music he american as he was it is sad to speak of him in the past tense and in these piping days of the pursuit of the gold piece held steadfast to his art

Starting point is 00:11:17 he attempted to do what others have failed in he attempted to lead here in our huge noisy city antipathetic to aesthetic creation the double existence of a composer and a pedagogue He burned away the delicate neurons of the cortical cells, and today he cannot say pianoforte without a trial. He suffers from aphasia and locomotor ataxia has begun to manifest itself. It would be tragedy in the household of any man. It is doubly so in the case of Edward McDowell. He has just passed 45 years, and there are, to his credit, some sense. 60 works, about 132 compositions in awe. These include essays in every form, except music, drama, symphonic and lyric, concertos and sonatas

Starting point is 00:12:17 for piano, little piano pieces of delicate workmanship, charged with poetic meanings, sweets for orchestra, and a romance for violoncello, with orchestral accompaniment. As a boy of 15, McDell went to the Paris. conservatoire, there entering the piano classes of Mar Montel. It was in 1876. Two years later, I saw him at the same institution, and later in comparing notes, we discovered that we had both attended a concert at the Trocadero, wherein Nicholas Rubinstein, the brilliant brother of Anton, played the B-flat minor concerto of a youthful and unknown composer Peter Ilyich Chikovsky, name. This same concerto had been introduced to America in 1876 by Hans von Buello, to whom it is

Starting point is 00:13:12 dedicated. Rubenstein's playing took hold of young McDowell's imagination. He saw there was no chance of mastering such a torrential style in Paris, or for that matter in Germany. It enjoyed lessons from Teresa Correna, but the beautiful Venezuelan was not then the virtuosa of today. So McDell who was accompanied by his mother, a sagewoman and deeply in sympathy with her son's aims, went to Frankfurt, where he had the benefit of Carl Heyman's tuition. He was the only pianist I ever heard who could be compared to our Raphael Josephi. But his influences, while marked in the development of his American pupil, did not weaken McDowell's individuality. Studies in composition under Joaquin Roth followed, and then he journeyed to Weimar for his baptism of fire at the hands of list.

Starting point is 00:14:10 That genial Prospero had broken his wand of virtuoso and devoted himself to the culture of youthful genius and his own compositions. He was pleased by the force, the surety, the brilliancy, and the poetic qualities of McDowell's playing, and he laughingly warned Eugène D'Albert to look to his laurels. The music was in the very bones of McDowell, and a purely virtuoso career, had no attraction for him. He married in 1884, Marion Nevins of New York, herself a pianist and a devoted propagandist of his music. The pair settled in Viesbaden,

Starting point is 00:14:50 and it was the happiest period of McDowell's career. He taught. He played his guest in various Germans. cities, above all he composed. His entire evolution is surveyed in Mr. Lawrence Gilman's sympathetic monograph. It was in V's bottom that he laid the foundation of his solid technique as a composer. I once asked him during one of our meetings how he had summoned the courage to leave such congenial surroundings, and that half-smiling, half-shy way of his, so full of charm and naivete, He told me his house had burned down, and he'd resolved to return home and make enough money to build another.

Starting point is 00:15:30 He came to America in 1888 and found himself, if not famous, at least well known, to Frank Bander Astucan, belongs the glory of having launched the young composer, and so long ago as 1886 in the old Chickering Hall. Some would like to point to the fact that America was McDowell's artistic undoing, but the truth is against them. As a matter of musical history, he accomplished his best work in the United States, principally on his farm at Peterborough, New Hampshire. Hardly one would imagine artistic soil for such a dreamer in tones, but life has a way of contradicting our theories. Teaching I've learned was not pursued to excess by McDowell, who had settled in Boston, yet I wish there were sumptuary legislation for such cases. Why should an

Starting point is 00:16:21 artists like McDowell have been forced into the shafts of dull routine. It is the larger selfishness, all this, but I cling to it. McDowell belonged to the public. Josephi belongs to the public. They doubtless did and do much good as teachers, but the public is the loser. Besides, if McDowell, who was a virtuoso, had confined himself to recitals, he might not. Alas, all this is bootless imagining. He launched him, himself with his usual unselfishness into the advancement of his scholars, and when in 1896 he was called to the chair of music at Columbia, the remaining seven years of his incumbency, he gave up absolutely to his classes. A sabbatical year intervened. He went to Switzerland for a rest,

Starting point is 00:17:10 then he made a tour of the West, a triumphal tour, and later followed the regrettable difference with Colombia. He resigned in 1904, and I doubt if he had had. a happy day since, that is, until the wave of forgetfulness came over him and blotted out all recollections. As a pianist, I may only quote what Raphael Josephi once said to me after a performance of the McDowell D. Minor concerto by its composer, what's the use of a poor pianist trying to compete with a fellow who writes his own music and then plays it, the way McDowell does? He was said jestingly, but as usual, when Josephi opens his mouth, there is a grain of wisdom in the speech. Vigdel's French training showed in his pianism in the velocity, clarity, and pearly quality of his scales and trills. He had the elegance of the salon player.

Starting point is 00:18:06 He knew the traditions, but he was modern, German and Slavic, in his combined musical interpretation and fiery attack. His tone was large, at times it was brutal. this pianist did not shine in a small hall he needed space as do his later compositions there was something both noble and elemental in the performance of his own sonatas at his instrument his air of preoccupation his fine poetic head the lines of which were admirably salient on the concert stage and his passion and execution were notable details in the harmonious picture Like Liszt, McDowell and his Steinway were as the writer and his steed. They seemed inseparable, under the batons of Nikes, Gereke, and Seidel, we heard him, and for once at least the critics were unanimous. When I first studied the McDowell music, I called the composer a belated romantic.

Starting point is 00:19:06 A romantic he is, by temperament, while his training under Roth further accentuated that tendency. It is a dangerous matter to make prediction. of a contemporary composer, it a danger critically courted in these times of rapid-fire judgments. I've been a sinner myself, and am still unregenerate, for if it be sinful to judge hastily in the affirmative,

Starting point is 00:19:30 by the same token it is quite as grave an error to judge hastily in the negative, so I shall dare the possible contempt of the succeeding critical generation, which I expect and hope will not calmly reverse our dearest predictions and range, myself on the side of McDowell. And with his reservation, I called him the most poetic composer of America. He would be a poetic composer in any land. It seems to me that his greatest, because his

Starting point is 00:19:58 most individual work, is to be found in his four piano sonatas. I'm always subdued by the charm of his songs, but he did not find his fullest expression in his lyrics. The words seemed to hamper the bold wing strokes of his inspiration. He did not go far enough in his orchestral work to warrant our saying, here is something new. He shows the influence of Vagnos slightly, of Grieg, of Roth, of Liszt in his first orchestral suite, his Hamlet and Ophelia, Lancelot and Elaine, the Saracens and lovely Alda, the Indian suite, and in the two concertos. The form is still struggling to emerge from the bonds of the romantics, of classic influence, there is little trace, but the general effect is fragmentary. It is not the real McDowell,

Starting point is 00:20:47 notwithstanding the mastery of technical material, the genuine feeling of orchestral color, which is natural, not studied. There are poetic moods. McDell is always a poet, yet no path-breaker. Indeed, he seemed as if hesitating. I remember how we discussed Brahms, Chikovsky, and Richard Strauss. the former he admired as a master-builder the latter piqued his curiosity tremendously particularly also sprach a zarathustra i think that chikoski made the deepest appeal though he said that the russians music sounded better than it was greg he admired but greg could never have drawn the long musical line we find in the macdall sonatas the fate of intermediate types is inevitable music is an art of specialization the vaguergues music drama, Chopin, piano, piano music, Schubert songs, Beethoven Symphony, glist symphonic poems, and Richard Strauss tone poems. All these are unique.

Starting point is 00:21:50 McDell has invented many lovely melodies that the Indian duet for orchestra, the woodland sketches, New England idols, the sea pieces, to the sea is a wonderful transcription of the mystery and the salt and savor of the ocean. We'll have a long life, but not as long as the piano sonatas. By them he will stand or fall. McDowell never goes grammatically mad on his harmonic tripod, nor does he tear passion to tatters in his search of the dramatic. If he recalls any English poet it is Keats, and like Keats, he is simple and sensuous in his imagery, and a lover of true romance, not the sham ecstasies of mock medieval romance, but that deep and tender sentiment which we encounter. in the poetry of Keats, in the magic of a moon half-veiled by flying clouds,

Starting point is 00:22:42 in the mystery and scent of old entangled gardens, I should call McDell a landscape painter, had I not heard his sonata music. Those sonatas, the tragica, heroica, Norse, and Celtic, with their broad, colored narrative, batted like tone, the heroic and chivalric accents, epic passion, and feminine tenderness. The psychology is simple, if you set this music against that, of Strauss, of Leffler, or of W.C. But it is noble, noble as the soul of the man who conceived it, elastic in form, orchestral in idea. These sonatas, which are looser spun in the web

Starting point is 00:23:19 than lists, will keep alive the name of McDowell. This statement must not be considered as evidence that I failed to enjoy his other work. I do enjoy much of it, especially the Indian orchestral suite, but the sonatas stir the blood above all the imagination, when the D'ratica appeared, I did not dream of three such successors. Now I like best the Celtic, with its dark magic and its tales of Deidre and the great Ku Klux. This fourth sonata is its Celtic as the combined poetic forces of the Neo-Celtic Renaissance in Ireland.

Starting point is 00:23:54 I believe McDow, when so sorely stricken, was at the parting of the ways. He spoke vaguely to me of studies for new symphonic works, presumably in the symphonic poem form of this. It would have always remained the poet and perhaps have pushed to newer scenes, but like Schumann, Donizetti, Smetana, and Hugo Wolfe, his brain gave way under the strain of intense study. The composition of music involves and taxes all the higher subribeal centers. The privilege was accorded me of visiting the sick man at his hotel several weeks ago, and I'm glad I saw him for his appearance dissipated the painful impression. I had conjured up. Our interview brief as it was became the reverse of morbid or unpleasant before it

Starting point is 00:24:42 terminated. With his mental disintegration, Sunday youth has returned to the composer. In snowy white, he looks not more than 25 years old until you note the gray in his thick, rebellious locks. There is still gold in his mustache, and his eyes are luminously blue. His expression suggests a spirit purged of all grossness, waiting for the summons. He smiles, but not as a madman. He talks hesitatingly, but never babbles. There is continuity in his ideas for minutes. Sometimes the words fit the idea. Often, he uses one foreign to his meaning, his wife of whose devotion almost poignant in its earnestness. It would be too sad to dwell upon is his faithful interpreter. He moves with difficulty. He plays dominoes, but seldom goes to the keyboard.

Starting point is 00:25:32 He reads slowly, and, like the unfortunate Friedrich Nietzsche, he rereads one page many times. I could not help recalling what Mrs. Elizabeth Forrester Nietzsche told me in Baimar of her brother, one day noticing that she silently wept the poet philosopher exclaimed, But why do you weak, little sister, are we not very happy? McDell is very happy, and his wife is braver than Nietzsche's sister. One fragment of his conversation, I recall, with glowing countenance he spoke of the thunderbolt in his wonderfully realistic piano poem, The Eagle.

Starting point is 00:26:08 Here had been a lightning storm during the afternoon, then he told me how he had found water by means of the hazel wand on his New Hampshire farm, a real happening. As I went away I could not help remembering that the final words I should ever hear uttered by this friend were of bright fire and running water and dream music. The above appeared in the New York Herald,

Starting point is 00:26:30 June 24, 1906, and is reprinted by request. Everett McDowell died January 23, 1908. End of Chapter 2. Chapter 3 of Unicorns. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Olivia.

Starting point is 00:26:58 Unicorns by James Hunaker Chapter 3 Remy de Gormand His ideas The Color of His Mind I de Césé designe Cééééééééééé de Gaumont Section 1

Starting point is 00:27:12 Those were days marked by a white stone when arrived in the familiar yellow cover, a new book with card enclosed from Remy de Gormand 71 Rue des Saint-Pairs Paris Sometimes I received as many as two in a year

Starting point is 00:27:27 but they always found me eager and grateful did those precious little volumes bearing the imprint of the Mercura de France, with whose history the name of de Germont is so happily linked. And there were postcards, too, in his delicate handwriting on which were traced sense and sentiment. Yes, this man of genius possessed sentiment, but abhorred sentimentality. His personal charm transpired in a friendly salutation, hastily pencilled. He played exquisitely upon his intellectual instrument, and knew the value of time and space. So his postcards are souvenirs of his courtesy, and it was through one, which unexpectedly fell from the sky in 1897, I began my friendship with this distinguished French critic. His sudden death in 1915 at Paris, he was born in 1858, caused by apoplexy, was the heroic ending of a man of letters.

Starting point is 00:28:20 Like Flaubert, he was stricken while at his desk. I can conceive no more fitting end for a valiant soldier of literature. He was a moral hero, and the victim of his prolonged technical heroism. De Gormant was incomparable, thought not action was his chosen sphere, but ranging up and down the vague and vast territory of ideas, he encountered countless cerebral adventures, the most dangerous of all. An aristocrat born, he was nevertheless a convinced Democrat. The latch was always lifted on the front door of his ivory, tower. He did live in a certain sense a cloistered existence, a benedictine of arts and letters,

Starting point is 00:29:02 but he was not, as has been said, a sour hermit nursing morose fancies in solitude. De Gremont, true pagan, enjoyed the gifts the gods provide, and had, despite the dualism of his nature, an epicurean soul, but of a complexity. He never sympathized with the disproportionate fuss raised by the metaphysicians about instinct and intelligence. yet his own magnificent cerebral apparatus was a battlefield over which swept the opposing hosts of instinct and intelligence, and in a half-hundred volumes the history of this conflict is faithfully set down. As personal as Maurice Barais, without his egotism, as subtle as Anatol France, de Grimont saw life steadier and broader than either of these two contemporaries.

Starting point is 00:29:50 He was the one who said, vast things simply. He was the profoundest philosopher of the three, and never, after his beginnings, exhibited a trace of the dilettante. Life soon became something more than a mere spectacle for him. He was a meeliorist in theory and practice, though he asserted that Christianity, an oriental-born religion, has not become spiritually acclimated among Occidental peoples, but he missed its consoling function. Religion, the poetry of the poor, never had for him the prime significance, that it had for William James. A legend, vague, vast, and delicious. Old frontiers have disappeared in science and art and literature. We have Matterlink, a poet, writing of bees. Ponne Keray,

Starting point is 00:30:38 a mathematician, opening our eyes to the mystic gulfs of space. Solid matters resolved into mist, and the law of gravitation questioned. The New Horizons beck an ardent youth bent on conquering the secrets of life, and there are more false beacon lights than true. But if this is an age of specialists, a man occasionally emerges who contradicts the formula. DeGermont was at base a poet, also a dramatist, novelist, raconteur, man of science, critic, moralist of erudition, and lastly, a philosopher. Both formidable and bewildering were his accomplishments. He is a poet in his hieroglyphs, orisons, Mouvees, Le Léry de Letténis, Les Sons de Paradis, Simone, Divertismans, his last appearance in singing robes in 1914. He is a raconteur and such tales. In history's

Starting point is 00:31:35 magiques, prose moroses, the pelourine du silence, dunpes long tonne, colors, a novelist in Merlet, his first book, 16. Le Phantom. Le Cheveau Dide Omeide? Le Sange of Unféme Auxneuxebourg. A corps virginal.

Starting point is 00:31:57 Dramatist in Theodat, Fennisa, Levoy Roy, Lilith. As master critic of the aesthetics of the French language, his supremacy is indisputable. It is hardly necessary

Starting point is 00:32:09 to refer here to Le Leves de Mosques in two volumes. The five volumes of Promenades Literer's, the three of Promenades Philosophics. As moralist, he has signed such works as Lé Delis-Lélisé, La Couture des Eudes, Le Chaman de Folours, historian and humanist, he has given us the Latin mystique, grammarian and philologist, he displays his learning in Le Problem de Style, and Enesite de la L'Lon French,

Starting point is 00:32:40 and incidentally, plays an unhappy pedagogue who proposed to impart the secret of style in 20 lessons. He edited many classics of French literature. His chief contribution to science, apart from his botanical and entomological researches, is Physique Delamour, in which he reveals himself as a patient, thorough observer in an almost new country. And what shall we say to his incursions into the actual, into the field of politics, sociology, and hourly happenings of Paris' life? His epilogues, in three volumes, dialogues de amateurs, the collected pages from his monthly contributions to Mercure de France. Nothing human was alien to him, nor inhuman, for he rejected, as quite meaningless, the latter

Starting point is 00:33:29 vocable, as he rejected such cliches as organic and inorganic. Years before we heard of a pluralistic universe, de Grimont was a pragmatist, though an idealist in his conception of the world as a personal picture. intensely interested in ideas, as he was in words, he might have fulfilled Lord Acton's wish that someone would write a history of ideas. At the time of his death, the French thinker was composing a work entitled Le Physique d'Amours, in which he contemplated a demonstration of his law of intellectual constancy. A spiritual cosmopolitan, he was, like most Frenchmen, an ardent patriot. The little squabble in the early 80s over a skit of his, Les Jou-Jou,

Starting point is 00:34:13 Petritism in 1883 caused him his post at the National Library in Paris. As a philosopher, he deprecated war. As a man, though too old to fight, he urged his countryman to victory, as may be noted in his last book, Pedant-Larange, in 1916. But the philosopher persists in such a sorrowful sentence as, in the tragedy of man, pieces but an entruct. To show his mental balance at a time when literally, men, artists, and even philosophers indulged in unseemly abuse, we read in Judge Mont, his calm admission

Starting point is 00:34:52 that the war has not destroyed for him the intellectual values of Goethe, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche. He owes much to their thought, as they owed much to French thought. Gerta has said as much, and of Voltaire and Chamfort, Schopenhauer was a disciple. Without being a practical musician, Degermont was a lover, of Beethoven and Wagner. He paid his compliments to Roman Royand, whose style both chalky and musilaginous, he dislikes in that overrated and spun-out series Jean-Christophe. Another little volume, La Belgique Literer, was published in 1915, which, while it contains nothing particularly knew about Georges Rodenbach, Emil Verharren, von Lierberg, Camille Lemonair, and Maurice Lutternick,

Starting point is 00:35:42 is excellent reading. The French critic was also editor of the Review Desiades, and, judging from the bibliography compiled by Pierre de Courlone, as long ago as 1903, he was a collaborator of numerous magazines. He wrote on Emerson, English humor, or Thomas Acampus, with the same facility as he dissected the mystic Latin writers of the early centuries after Christ. Indeed, such versatility was viewed askance by the plodding crowd of college professors, his general adversaries, but his erudition could not be challenged. Only two other men matched his scholarship, Anatole France and the late Marcel Schwab. And we have only skimmed the surface of his accomplishments. Réé des Grimont is the admirable Crichton of French letters.

Starting point is 00:36:31 Section 2 Prodigious incoherence might be reasonably expected from this diversity of interests, yet the result is quite the reverse. The artist in this complicated man banished confusion. He has told us that, because of the

Starting point is 00:36:47 diversity of his aptitudes, man is distinguished from his fellow animals, and the variety in his labors is proof positive of his superiority to such fellow critics as the mentally constipated brunitier, the impressionistic anatole France, the agile and graceful Le Marte, and the pedantic Philistine Fogé. But if de Gremont always attains clarity with no loss of depth, he sometimes mixes his genres,

Starting point is 00:37:15 that is, the poet peeps out in his reports of the psychic life of insects, as the philosopher lords it over the pages of his fiction. A mystic be times, he is a crystal clear thinker, and consider the Catholicity evinced in the L'Ir de Mosques. He wrote of such widely diverging talents as Matterlink, Mel Armey, Villers de Lis L'Am, and Paul Adam, of Henri de Regnier and Jules Reynard, of Hoismen and Jules Le Forge, the mysticism of Francis Pointe-Tiven's style, and the imagery of St. Paul Aruhe, he defined, and he displays an understanding of the first symbolist poet, Art Rimbaud, while disliking the personality of that abnormal youth. But why recite this litany of new

Starting point is 00:38:05 talent literally made visible and vocal by our critic? It is a pleasure to record the fact that most of his swans remain swans and did not degenerate into tame geese. In this book he shows himself a profound psychologist. Insatiably curious, he yet contrived to drive his chimeras in double harness and safely. His best fiction is 16 and Unui Ongo Luxembourg, if fiction they may be called. Never will their author be registered among bestsellers. Sixteen deals with the adventures of a masculine brain. Ideas are the hero. In Uncurve Virginal, we touch earth, fleshly and spiritually. This story shocked its readers. It may be considered as a sequel to Physique de la Mour. It shows mankind as a gigantic insect,

Starting point is 00:38:54 indulging in the same apparently blind pursuit of sex sensation as a beetle, and also shows us the female of our species, endowed with less capacity for modesty than the Lady Mole, the most chaste of all animals. Disconcerting, too, is the psychology of the heroine's virginal soul. Not, however, cynical. Cynicism is the irony of vice, and Descermont is never cynical, but a master of irony. Unui Oloxomborg has been done into English. It handles with delicacy and frankness, themes that in the hands of a lesser artist

Starting point is 00:39:32 would be banished as brutal and blasphemous. The author knows that all our felicity is founded on a compromise between the dream and reality, and for that reason, while he signals the illusion, he never mocks it. He is too much an idealist. In the elaborately carved cups of his tales, foaming over with exquisite perfumes and nectar,

Starting point is 00:39:54 there lurks the bitter drop of truth. He could never have said, with Proton, that woman is the desolation of the just, for him woman is often an obsession. Yet, captain of his instincts, he sees her justly. He is not subdued by sex. With a gesture, he destroys the sentimental scaffolding of the sensualist, and marches on to new intellectual conquests. In Lilith an Adamic morality, he reveals his Talmudic lore. The first wife of our common ancestor is a beautiful hell-hag, the accomplice of Satan in the corruption of the human race. Thus, medieval play is epical in its rebellasian plainness of speech.

Starting point is 00:40:36 Perhaps the Manichaean in Desgermont fabricated its revolting images. He had traversed the Bodilarian steps of blasphemy and black pessimism, Bodilare, a poet who was a great critic. Odi Profanum vulgous was de Gormand's motto, but his soul was responsive to so many contacts that he emerged, as Barais emerged, a citizen of the world. Anarchy as a working philosophy did not long content him, though he never relinquished his detached attitude of proud individualism.

Starting point is 00:41:09 He saw through the sentimental equality of J.J. Rousseau. Rousseau it was, who said that thinking man was a depraved animal. Perhaps he was not far from the truth. Man is an effective animal, more interested in the immediate testimony of his senses than in his intellectual processes. His metaphysics may be but the reverberation of his sensations on the shore of his subliminal self. The echo of the sounding shell he calls his soul. Anachritic had his scientific studies to console him for the inevitable sterility of soul that follows egoism and a barren debaq of the sensations.

Starting point is 00:41:47 He did not tarry long in the valley of excess. His artistic sensibility was his savior. Without being a dogmatist, de Gromont was an antagonist of absolutism, a determinist, which may be dogmatism, a rebor. A relativist, he holds that mankind is not especially favored species of the animal scale. Thought is only an accident, possibly the result of rich nutrition. An automaton, man has no free will, but it is better for him to imagine that he has, It is a sounder working hypothesis for the average human.

Starting point is 00:42:21 The universe had no beginning, it will have no end. There is no first link or last in the chain of causality. Everything must submit to the law of causality. To explain a blade of grass, we must dismount the stars. Nevertheless, de Gaormant, no more than Renan, had the mania of certitude. Humbly, he interrogates the Sphinx. There are no isolated phenomenon in time or space. The mass of matter is eternal.

Starting point is 00:42:46 man is an animal submitting to the same laws that govern crystals or brutes. He is the expression of matter in physique and chemistry. Repetition is the law of life. Thought is a physiological product. Intelligence, the secretion of matter, and is amenable to the law of causality. This sounds like Tain's famous definition of virtue and vice. And who shall deny it all in the psychochemical laboratories? It is not the rigid old-fashioned materialism,

Starting point is 00:43:14 but a return to the more plastic theories of Lamarck and the transformism of the Dutch botanist Hugo de Vrie. For Desgermont, the Darwinian notion that man is at the topmost notch of creation is as antique and absurd as most cosmogonies. Indeed, it is the Asiatic egocentric idea of creation, Jacob's ladder repainted in Darwinian symbols. "'Fual la l'enémy,' said de Gormand put on his controversial armor. What blows, what sudden deadly attacks were his. Quinton has demonstrated to the satisfaction of many scientists that bird life came later on our globe than the primates from whom we stem.

Starting point is 00:43:56 The law of thermal constancy proves it by the interior temperature of birds. Man preceded the carnivorous and ruminating animals, of whom the body temperature is lower than that of birds. The ants and bees and beavers are not a whit more automatic than mankind. Automatism, says Rebo, is the rule. Thought is not free, wrote William James. When to it an affirmation is added, then it is but the affirmation of a preference. Man, asserts de Grimont, is infinite in his mimicry.

Starting point is 00:44:27 His superiority is in the immense diversity of his abilities. He welcomed Jules de Gautier and his theory of Bovarism of the vital lie, because of which we pretend to be what we are not. that way spells security, if not progress. The idea of progress is another necessary illusion, for it provokes a multiplicity of activities. Our so-called free will is not but the faculty of making a decision determined by a great and varied number of motives. As for morality, it is the outcome of tribal taboos. The insect and animal world shows deepest-died immorality, revolting cruelty, and sex-proversity,

Starting point is 00:45:08 rabbits and earthworms, through no fault of their own, suffer from horrible maladies, from all of which our critic deduces his law of intellectual constancy. The human brain, since prehistoric times, has been neither diminished nor augmented. It has remained like a sponge, which can be dry or saturated, but still remains itself. It is a constant, in a favorable environment it is enriched. The greatest moment in the history of the human family was the discovery of fire by an anthropoid of genius. Prometheus then should be our God. Without him, we should have remained more or less simeon and probably of arboreal habits. Section 3. A synthetic brain is Degormance, a sower of doubts,

Starting point is 00:45:51 though not a no-sayer to the universe. He delights in challenging accepted truths. Of all our modern thinkers, a master of view deslams. He smiles at the pretensions, usually a mask for poverty of ideas, of so-called general ideas. He disliked. He disliked. He disliked. He disliked. He associates such conventional grouping of ideas as glory, justice, decadence. The shining ribs of disillusioned shine through his psychology, a psychology of nuance and finesse. Disillusioning reflections these. Not to be put in any philosophical pigeonhole, he is as far removed from the eclecticism of of Victor Cosson as from the verbal jugglery and metaphysical murmurings of Henri Bergson. The world is his dream, but it is a tangible dream, charged with meaning,

Starting point is 00:46:37 order, logic, and truest reality is thought. Action spoils. Gerta said, thought expands, action narrows. Our abstract ideas are metaphysical idols, says Jules de Gaultier. The image of the concrete is de Gromont's touchstone. Teophil Gautier declared that he was the man for whom the visible world existed. He misjudged his capacity for apprehending reality. The human brain, excellent instrument in a priori combinations,

Starting point is 00:47:05 is inept at perceiving realities. The sultan of the epithet, as Desgramon nicknamed Le Bontejo, was not the emperor of thought, according to Henry James, and for him it was a romantic fiction spun in the rich web of his fancy. A vaster, grayer world is outbrated in the books of de Grimaud. He never allowed symbolism to deform his representation of sober, everyday life. He pictured the future domain of art and ideas as a fair and shining landscape, no longer a series of little gardens with high walls.

Starting point is 00:47:39 A hater of formulas, sex, schools, he teaches the capital crime of the artist, the writer, the thinker, is conformity. Yet how serenely this critic swims in classic currents. The artist's work should reflect his personality, a magnified reflection. He must create his own aesthetic, there are no schools, only individuals.

Starting point is 00:48:00 And of consistency, he might have said that it is oftener a mule than a jewel. skeptical in all matters though never the fascinated sophist that is anatole france de romans criticized the thirty-six dramatic situations reducing the number to four man as centre in relation to himself in relation to other men in relation to the other sex in relation to god or nature his ecclesiastical font may be recognized in le chaman de volour with its sympathetic exposition of jesuit doctrine and the acuity of its judgments on Pascal and the Jansenists. The latter section is an illuminating footnote to the history of Port Royal by Saint-Bove. The younger critic has a supple intellect of the suplest-minded Jesuit. His bias toward the order is unmistakable. There are few books I reread with more pleasure than this path of velvet. Certain passages in it are as silky and sonorous as the sound of Eugene Yase's violin.

Starting point is 00:49:00 The color of de Gromond's mind is stained by his artistic sensibility. A maker of images, his vocabulary is astounding. As befits both a poet and a philologist, one avid of beautiful words has variety. The temper of his mind is tolerant, a quality which has informed the finer intellects of France since Montaigne. His literary equipment is unusual, a style as brilliant, sinuous, and personal as his thought. Flexible or massive, continent or colored, he discourses at ease in all the gamuts and modes, major, minor, and mixed. A swift, weighty style, the style of a Latinist, a classic and not a romantic style. His formal sense is admirable. The tenderness of Anatol France is absent, except in his verse, which is less spontaneous than

Starting point is 00:49:52 volitional. A pioneer in new aesthetic pleasures, de Grimont is a poet for poets. He has virtuosity, though the gift of tears, nature, possibly jealous because of her prodigality, has denied him. But in the curves of his overarching intellect, there may be found wit, gaiety, humor, the Gallic attributes, allied with poetic fancy, profundity of thought, and a many-sided comprehension of life, art, and letters. He is in the best tradition of French criticism. only more versatile than either San Boe or Tain, as versatile as Dr. Brandis or Arthur Simmons, and that is saying much.

Starting point is 00:50:31 With Anatol France, he could have exclaimed, the longer I contemplate human life, the more I believe that we must give it for witnesses and judges, irony, and pity. End of Chapter 3, recording by Olivia. Chapter 4 of Unicorns. This is our Libre Walks recording, All Librivox recordings are in the public domain.

Starting point is 00:50:56 For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org Unicorns by James Haneker Chapter 4 Arzebachev Part 1 Once upon a time Maurice Metterlink wrote Whereas it's far away from bloodshed,

Starting point is 00:51:18 battle cry and sword thrust that the lives of most of us flow on, and the tears of men are silent today and invisible and almost spiritual. This is a plea for his own spiritualized art, in which sensations are attenuated, and emotions within emotions, the shadows of the primal emotions, are spun into crepuscular shapes. But literature refused to follow the example of the Belgian dreamer, and since the advent of the new century there has been a recrudescence of violence, a melodramatic violence that must be disconcerting to Matterlink. It is particularly the case with Russian poetry, drama and fiction. That vast land of promise and

Starting point is 00:52:17 disillusionment is become a trying-out place for the theories and speculations of Western Europe. No other nation responds so sensitively to the vibration of the time spirit. No other literature reflects with such clearness the fluctuations of contemporary thought and sensibility. The Slav is the most emotional among living peoples. Not that mysticism is missing. Indeed, it is the key not of much Russian literature, but it was the clash of events, the march of ideas which precipitated young Russia

Starting point is 00:53:05 into the expression of revolt, pessimism, and its usual concomitant materialism. There were a bloodshed, battle cries, and sword thrusts and tears, tangible, not invisible, in the uprising of ten years ago. The four great masters, Gogel, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Tolstoy still ruled the minds of the intellectuals, but a younger element was the yeast in the new fermentation. Chekhov, with his epical enui, with his tales of men, colorless lives,

Starting point is 00:53:53 Gorky and his disinherited barefoot brigade, the dramatic Andreev, the mystic sologube, cuprine, Zensky, Kuzmin, Ivanov, Robschen, Zaytzev, Chepigen, Serafimovich. I select a few of the new romancers, not to mention such poets as Bloch, Remizov and Ivanov, are the men who are fighting under various banners, but always for complete freedom. Little more than a decade has passed since the appearance of a young man named Michael Arzebachev, who, without any preliminary blaring of trumpets, has taken the center of the stage and still holds it. He is as Slavic as Dostoevsky, more pessimistic than Tolstoy, though not the supreme artist that was Turgenev. Of Gogol's overwhelming humor,

Starting point is 00:55:04 he has not a trace, instead a corroding irony which eats into the very vitals of faith in all things human. Gorky, despite his bitter nickname, is an incorrigible optimist compared with Arzebachev. One sports with Nietzsche, the other not only swears by Max Schwarz. but some of his characters are sternerism incarnate. His chosen field in society is the portrayal of the middle-class and proletarian. To André Villar, his friend and one of his translators, the new Russian novelist told something of his life, a life colorless, dreary, bear of dramatic events. Born in a small town in southern Russia, 1878, Michael Rzebache is of Tatar, French, Georgian, and Polish blood.

Starting point is 00:56:19 His great-grandfather on the maternal side was the Polish patriot Kosciuszko. His father, a retired officer, was a small landowner. In the lead there developed the seeds of tuberculosis. His youth was a wretched one. At school he was unhappy because of its horrors. He has written of them in his first story, Pasha Tumanov. And he drifted from one thing to another till he wrote for a literary weekly in the provinces

Starting point is 00:56:58 founded by a certain Miralyubov, to whom he ascribes his first lift in life. Fellow contributors at the time were Maxim Gorki, Leonid Andreeev, Couprin, and other young men who, like Art Sebachev, have since arrived. His first successful tale was Ivan Lande. It brought him recognition. This was in 1904. But the year before he had finished Sannin, his masterpiece, though it did not see publication till 2008.

Starting point is 00:57:44 This was three years after the revolution of 1905, so that those critics were astray to spoke of the book as a naturally pessimistic reaction from the fruitless uprising. Pessimism was born in the bones of the author, and he needed no external stimulus to provoke such a realistic study as Sennin. Whether he is happier, healthier, where he has married and raised the family, we know not. personal as his stories are said to be, their art renders them objective.

Starting point is 00:58:31 The world over, Sanyan has been translated. It is a significant book and incorporates the aspirations of many young men and women of the Russian Empire. It was not printed at first because of the censorship, and in Germany it had to battle. for its life. It is not only written from the standpoint of a professed immoralist, but the Russian censor declared it pernicious because of its defamation of youth, its societal doctrine, its depressing atmosphere. The sex element, too, has aroused indignant protests from the clergy, from the press, from society itself. In reply to his critics, Arzabashov has denied labeling the younger generation.

Starting point is 00:59:34 Sanin, he says, is the apology for individualism. The hero of the novel is a type. In its pure form, this type is still new and rare. but its spirit is in every frank, bold and strong representative of the new Russia. And then he adds his own protest against the imitators of Sannin, who flooded the literary word with pornographic writings. Now, whatever else it may be, Sanyin is not pornographic, though I shall not pretend to say that its influence has been harmless.

Starting point is 01:00:24 We should not forget Werther and the trail of sentimental suicides that followed its publication. But Sonin is fashioned of sterner stuff than Goethe's romance, and if it be dangerous, then all the better. Test all things. And remember that living itself is a dangerous affair. Never has the world needed precepts of daring, courage, individualism, more than in this age of cowardly self-seeking, and the sleek promises of altruism and its soulless well-being. Sannin is a call to arms for individualists.

Starting point is 01:01:15 And recall the Russian's saying, self-conceit is the salt of life. Part 2. That Arcebashv denies the influence of Nizsche, while admitting his indebtedness to Nizs' forerunner, Max Sturner, need not particularly concern us. There are evidences scattered throughout the pages of Sannin that, prove a close study of Nietzsche and his idealistic Superman. Artist, as is Artsebashv, he has densely spun into the fabric of his work

Starting point is 01:02:01 the ideas that control his characters, and whether these ideas are called moral or immoral does not matter. The chief thing is whether they are propulsive forces, the destiny of his puppets. That he paints directly from life is evident. He tells us that in him is the debris of a painter compelled by poverty to relinquish his ambitions, because he had not the money enough to buy paper, pencil, color. Such a realistic brush has seldom been wielded as the brush. of Art Sebastian.

Starting point is 01:02:50 I may make one exception, that of J.K. Hewismans. The Frenchman is the greater artist, the greater master of his material, and, as Heavillock Ellis puts it, the master of the intensest vision of the modern world. But Hewis lacks the all-embracing sympathy, the tremulous pity, the love of suffering mankind that distinguishes the young Russian novelist,

Starting point is 01:03:27 a love that is blended with an appalling distrust, nay, hatred of life. Both men prefer the sordid, disagreeable, even the vilest aspects of life. The general ideas of Art Sebastian are few and profound. The leading motive of his symphony is as old as ecclesiastes. The thing that hath been is that which shall be. It is not original this theme, and it is as eternal as mediocrity. But it has been orchestrated anew by Art Zebachev, who, like his fellow countrymen, Cheikovsky and Musorgsky, contrives to reveal to us, if no hidden angles of the truth.

Starting point is 01:04:27 At least its illusion in terms of terror, anguish, and deadly nausea produced by mere existence. With such poisoned roots, Arzibashev's tree of life must soon be blasted. His intellectual indifferentism to all that constitutes the solace and bravery of our daily experience is almost pathological. The aura of sadism hovers about some of his men. After reading Arzibashiv, you wonder that the kind of the kind of. question, is life worth living, will ever be answered in the affirmative among these humans, who, as old Homer says, Hassan Hellward from their birth? The corollary to this leading

Starting point is 01:05:27 motive is the absolute futility of action. A paralysis of the will overtakes his characters, the penalty of their torturing introspection. It was Turgenev in an essay on Hamlet, who declared that the Russian character is composed of Hamlet-like traits. Man is the only animal that cannot live in the present. A Norwegian philosopher, Saren Kierkegar, has said that he lives forward, thinks backward. He aspires to the future.

Starting point is 01:06:09 An idealist, even when close to the gorilla, is doomed to disillusionment. He discounts tomorrow. Russian youth has not always the courage of its chimera, though it fraternizes with the phantasmagoria of its soul. Its golden street soon becomes choked with fog. The political and social conditions of the country must stifle individualism. Else, why should Art Sebastian write with such savage intensity? His pen is the pendulum that has swung away from the sentimental brotherhood of man, as exemplified in Dostoevsky, and from the religious mania of Tolstoy to the opposite extreme,

Starting point is 01:07:03 individual anarchy. Where there is repression, there is rebellion. Max Scherner represents the individualism which found its vent to the Prussia of 1848. Nietzsche, the reaction from the Prussia of 1870. Arzibashev forestalled the result of the 1905 insurrection in Russia. His prophetic soul needed no proof. He knew that his people, the students of intellectuals, would be crushed. The desire of the clod for the cloud was extinguished.

Starting point is 01:07:49 Happiness is an eternal hawks. Only children believe in life. The last call of the devil's dinner bell has sounded. In the scenery of the sky there is only mirage. The moonlit air is a ruse of that wily old serpent, nature, to arouse romance in the breast of youth and urge a repetition of the life processes. We graze Schopenhauer, over here Leopardy.

Starting point is 01:08:26 But the preacher has the mightiest voice. Naturally, the novelist says none of these things outright. The phrases are mine, but he points the moral in a way that is all his own. What then is the remedy for the ills of this life? Is it misery irremediable? Why must mankind go on living if the burden is so great? Even with wealth comes ennui or disease, and no matter how brilliant we may live, we must all die alone. Pascal said this better.

Starting point is 01:09:16 In several of his deathbed scenes, the dying man of Arzibashev curse their parents, mock at religion, and, here is a novel nuance, abuse their intellectual leaders. Simeonov, the student, who appears in several of the stories, abuses Marx and Nietzsche. Of what use are these thinkers to a man about to depart from the world? It is the revolt of stark humanity from the illusions of God. brotherly love, from the chiefest illusion, self? Arcebachev offers no magic draft of oblivion to his sufferers. With a vivid style that recalls the Tolstoy of the death of Ivan Elyche,

Starting point is 01:10:13 he shows us old and young wrestling with the destroyer, their souls emptied of all earthly hopes save one. Shall I live? Not God will be done, not the arosiate dream of a future life, only why must I die, though the poor devil is submerged in the very swamp of life. But life, life, even a horrible hell for eternity rather than annihilation. In the portrayal of these damn creatures, Art Zubashiv is elemental. He recalls both Dante and Dostoevsky.

Starting point is 01:11:04 He has told us that he owes much to Tolstoy, also to Goethe, Hugo, Dostoevsky, and much to Chekhov. But his characters are usually failures when following the tenets of Tolstoy, the grand. great moralist and expounder of non-resistance. He simply explode the torpedo of truth under the arc of socialism. This may be noted in Ivan Lande, now in the English volume entitled The Millionaire, where we see step by step the decadence of a beautiful soul obsessed by the love of his fellows. It is in the key of Tolstoy, but the moral is startling. Not thus can you save your soul. Max Sturner is to the fore.

Starting point is 01:12:05 Don't turn your other cheek if one has been smitten, but smite the smiter and heartily. However, not a wails. You must die and die like a dog. a star or a flower. Better universal suicide. Success comes only to the unfortunate. And so we swing back to Edward von Hartman,

Starting point is 01:12:35 who in his philosophy of the unconscious, counsels the same thing. A ferocious advocate of pessimism and the disciple of Arthur Schopenhauer by name mainlander, reached world destruction for the race suicide. But all these pessimists seem well-fed and happy when compared to the nihilists of Arzibashev. He portrays every stage of disillusionment with a glacial calmness. Not even annihilation is worth the trouble of a despairing gesture.

Starting point is 01:13:16 Ki Bono Revolutionist or royalist your career is, if you but dare break the conspiracy of silence, a burden or a sorrow. Happiness is only a word. Love, a brief sensation. Death, a certainty.

Starting point is 01:13:39 For such nihilism, we must go to the jungles of Asia, where in a lifelong silence some fanatic fatidically stares at his navel, the circular symbol of eternity. Part 3 But if there is no philosophical baum in Gilead, there is the world of the five senses, and the glorious world it may prove, if you have only the health, courage and contempt for the Chinese wall with which man has surrounded his instincts. There are no laws except to be broken, no conventions that cannot be shattered. There is the blue sky, brother, and the air of the heath, brother.

Starting point is 01:14:36 Drop the impedimenta and lead a free. rowing life. How the world would wag without work? No one tells us. Not didactic. The novelist disdains to draw a moral. There is much Sturner, some Nizhre in Senin, who is a handsome young chap, a giant and a blonde barbarian. It is the story of the return of the native to his home in a small town. He finds his mother as he left her, older, but as narrow as ever, and his sister, Lydia, one of the most charming girls in Russian fiction. Sennin is surprised to note her development. He admires. He admires. her, too much so for our Western taste. However, there is something monstrous in the moral and mental

Starting point is 01:15:46 makeup of this hero, who is no hero. He may be a type, but I don't believe in types. There are only humans. His motto might be, what's the difference? He is past. He is passionate. He is not with the fatalism of Oblomov Gonscherov's hero, not with the apathy of Charles Bowery, or the timid passivity of Friedrich Moreau, he displays an indifference to the trivial things of life that makes him seem an idler on the scene. When the time arrives for action, he is no skulker. His sister has been ruined by a freevaless officer in Garrison, and she attempts suicide.

Starting point is 01:16:44 Her brother rescues her, not heroically, but philosophically, and shows her the folly of believing in words. Ruined. Very well, marry and forget. However, he drives the officer to see. suicide by publicly disgracing him. He refuses a duel, punches his head, and the silly soldier, with his silly code of owner, blows out his brains. A passive role is senin's in the composition of this elaborate canvas, the surface simplicity of which deceives us as to its polyphonic complexity.

Starting point is 01:17:32 in the background, while about him play the little destinies of little souls, yet he is always the fulcrum for a climax. I have not yet made up my mind whether Sannin is a great man or a thorough scoundrel, perhaps both. A temperamental and imaginative writer is Artsebachev. I first read him, 1911, in French, the translation of Jacques Pavlovsky, and his style recalled at times that of Turgenev, possibly because of the language. In the German translation, he is not so appealing, again, perhaps of the difference in the tongues. As I can't read Russian, I am forced to fall back on translations, and they seldom give an idea of personal rhythm, unless it be a Turgenev translating into Russian the three tales of his friend Floubert. Nevertheless, through the veil of a foreign speech, the genius of Artzebachev shines like a crimson sun in a mist. Of course, we miss the carousine cadence and rich sonorousness of the organ-tone Russian language.

Starting point is 01:19:03 The English versions are excellent, though, naturally enough, occasionally chastened and abbreviated. I must protest here against the omission of a chapter in Breaking Point, which is a key to the ending of the book. I mean the chapter in which is related the reason why the wealthy drunkard goes to the monastery, there to end his days. Years ago, Mr. Howells said that we could never write of America as Dostoevsky did of Russia. And it was true enough at the time, nor would we ever tolerate the nudities of certain Gaelic, novelists. Well, we have, and I'm fain to believe that the tragic issues of American life should be given fuller expression, and with the same sincerity as Art Sebastian's, whose strength is

Starting point is 01:20:10 his sincerity, whose sincerity is a form of his genius. The very air of America makes for optimism. Our land of milk and honey may never produce such profits of pessimism as Arzibashev, unless conditions change. But the lesson for our novelists is the courageous manner and artistic, too, with which the Russian pursues the naked soul of mankind and dissects it. He notes, being a psychologist as well as a painter, the exquisite recoil of the cerebral cells upon themselves, which we call consciousness. Profoundly human in his sympathies, without being in the least sentimental, he paints full-length portraits of men and women with a flowing brush and a fine sense of character. values, but he will never bend the bow of Balzac. Vladimir Sunin is not his only successful portrait. In the book, there are several persons.

Starting point is 01:21:30 The disgraced student Yuri, who is self-complacent to the point of morbidity, his lovely sister and her betrothed. The officers are ex-execisive. delineated and differentiated, while the girls, Zina Karsavina and her friend, the teacher, are extremely attractive. Korsavina is a veracious personality. The poor little homeless Hebrew, who desires light on the mystery of life, could not be bettered by Dostoevsky.

Starting point is 01:22:10 For that matter, Arzibashe is partially indebted to Dostoevsky. for certain traits of Ivan Landy, who is evidently patterned from Prince Mishkin in The Idiot. Wherever Sanyan passes, trouble follows. He is looked on as possessing the evil eye, yet he does little but lounge about, drink hard, and make love to pretty girls. But as he goes, he snuffs out ideals like candles. As Art Sebastian is a born storyteller, it must not be supposed that the book is unrelieved in its gloom. There are plenty of gay episodes, sensational, even shocking, a picnic, a shooting party, and pastoral's done in a way which would have extorted the admiration of Turgana.

Starting point is 01:23:12 Thomas Hardy has done no better in his peasant life. There are various gatherings, chiefly convivial, a meeting of would-be intellectuals for self-improvement related with blasting irony, and drinking festivals which are masterly in their sense of reality. Add to these pages of nature descriptions, land-scarf. pictures of the earth in all seasons and guises, revealing a passionate love of the soil which is truly Russian. You fairly smell the frosty air of his winter days. Little cause for astonishment that Sannin at its appearance provoked as much controversy, as much admiration and hatred as did fathers and sons of Turgeniv.

Starting point is 01:24:12 Vladimir Sannin is not as powerful as Bazarov the anarchist, but he is a pendant. He is an anarch of the new order, neither a propagandist by the act, but a philosophical anarch who lazily mutters, let the world wag. I don't care so that it minds its own business and lets me alone. With few exceptions, most latter-day fiction is thin, papery, artificial, compared with Arzebachev's rich, red-blooded genius. I have devoted so much attention to Sanyan that little space is left for the other books, though they are all significant.

Starting point is 01:25:02 Revolutionary Tales contains a strong companion picture to Sannin, the portrait of the metal worker Shiver Joy, who is a revolutionist in the literal sense, his hunted life and death arouse a terrific impression. The end is almost operatic. A captivating little working girl figures in one episode. It may be remarked in passing that Artzebachev does not paint for our delectation the dear dead drabs of yester years, nor yet the girl of the street who heroically brings bread to her starving family, as does Sonia in crime and punishment. Few outcasts of this sort are to be found in his pages,

Starting point is 01:25:58 and those few are unflinchingly etched, as, for example, the ladies in the millionaire. This story, which is affiliated in ideas with Sennin, is Tolstoyan in the main issue, yet disconcertingly different in its interpretation. Wealth, too, may become an incitement to self-slaughter, from sheer disgust. The story of Pasha Tomanov is autobiographical,

Starting point is 01:26:32 and registers his hatred of the Russian grammar schools, where suicides among the scholars are anything but infrequent. Morning Shadows relates the adventures of several young people who go to Petrograd to seek fame, but with tragic conclusions. The two girls' students, and badly, one is suicide, the other, a prisoner of the police, as an anarchist caught red-handed. A stupefying narrative in its horrid realism and sympathetic handling. The doctor gives us a picture of a pogrom in a tiny Russian province town.

Starting point is 01:27:22 You simply shudder at the details of the wretched Jews shot down, ripped open, maltreated, and driven into the wilderness. It's a time for tears, though I cannot quite believe in this doctor, who, while not a Jew, so sympathizes with them that he lets die the chief of police that ordered the massacre. Another story of similar intensity called Nina in the English translation fills us with wonder that such outrages can go unpunished. But I am only interested in the art of the novelist, not in political conditions or their causes.

Starting point is 01:28:12 Perhaps the most touching story in revolutionary tales is the blood stain, confessedly beloved by its author. Again, we are confronted by the uselessness of all attempts to right injustice. Might is right. Ever was, ever will be. Again, the victims of lying propagandists and the cruel law lie on stretchers with white eyes staring upward. In these eyes there was a look, a sad, questioning, look of horror and despair. Always despair in life or death is the portion of these poor. This was written in 1915 before the new Russia was born.

Starting point is 01:29:13 Since the beginning of the war, Arzibashev has served in the fields and hospitals. He has written several plays, one of which, war has been translated. It is a terrific arraignment of war. His latest story, the woman standing in the midst, has not yet appeared here. Without suggesting a rigid schematology, there is a composition plain in his larger work that may be detected if the reader is not confused by the elliptical patterns and the massive mounds of minor details in his novel breaking point. The canvas is large and crowded, the motivation subtly managed. As is the case with his novels, the drama plays in a provincial town, this time on the steps, where the inhabitants would

Starting point is 01:30:17 certainly commit suicide if the place were half as dreary or, is depicted. Some of them do so, and you are reminded of that curious nervous disease, indigenous to Siberia, named by psychiatrists Myriad, or the epidemic of imitation. A man, a sinister rascal, Naumov, preaches the greyness and folly of living, and this, Naumov, is, sets by the ears three or four impressionable young men who make their exit with a bare bodkin for its equivalent. Nauma recalls a character in The Possessed, also the sinister hero of the Synagogue of Saturn by the dramatic Polish writer Stanislov Kjibyshevsky. To give us a central point, the chorus of the novel is a little student who resembles a goldfinch and has a bird-like way of piping about matters philosophical.

Starting point is 01:31:33 There are oceans of talk throughout the novels. Talks about death. Really, you wonder how the Russians contrive to live at all, till you meet them and discover what normal people they are. It should not be forgotten that art must contain as an element of success a slight deformation of facts. The student watches the comedy and tragedy of the town, his brain flaming with noble ideas for the regeneration of mankind. Alas, Naumov bids him reflect on the uselessness of suffering from self-privation,

Starting point is 01:32:21 so that some proletarian family may eat roast larks in the 30th century. Eventually he succumbs to the contagion of resemblance, takes to drink, and hangs himself to a nail in the wall, His torn gum shoes, clinging to his feet, faithful to the last. They, Dickens-like, are shown from the start. There is an nihilistic doctor, the most viable character of all about whose head hovers the aura of apoplexy. A particularly fascinating actress, an interesting consumptive, two wretched girls betrayed by a young painter, a Sannian type. That is, Max Stiernerism in action.

Starting point is 01:33:21 While the officers of the garrison and club life are cunningly pictured, a wealthy manufacturer with the hallmarks of Mr. Rogosian in Dostoevsky's The Idiot makes an awful noise till he luckily vanishes in a monastery. Suicide, raping, disorder, drunkenness and boredom permeate nearly every page. Breaking Point is the most poignant and intolerable book I ever read. It is the prose complement of Chikovsky's so-called suicide symphony. Browning is reversed.

Starting point is 01:34:06 Here the devil is in heaven. All's wrong in the world. Yet it compels reflection and rereading. Why? Because, like all of his writings, it is inevitable and granting the exaggeration inherent in the nature of the subject. It is lifelike, though its philosophy is dangerous, depressing. The little city of the steps is the cemetery of the seven sorrows. However, in it, as in Sanin, there is many an oasis of consolation where sanity and cheerfulness and normal humans may be enjoyed. But I am lot to believe that young Russia, holy Russia, as de Mistagogues call her, has lost her central grip on the things that must count, above all, on religious faith. Then needs must she pray as parade desecentes in Hussman's novel Ereburo. Take pity, O Lord, on the Christian who doubts,

Starting point is 01:35:33 on the skeptic who desires to believe, on the convict of life who embarks alone in the night, beneath the sky no longer lit by the consoling beacons of ancient faith. End of chapter four. Chapter 5 of Unicorns. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org.

Starting point is 01:36:14 Recording by St. John. Unicorns by James Hunaker. Chapter 5. A Note on Henry James, Part 1. In company with other distinguished men who have passed away during the progress of the war, the loss of Henry James was passably chronicled. News from the various battlefields took precedence over the death of a mere man of literary genius. This was to be expected, nor need the fact be disguised that his secession from American citizenship may have increased the coolness which prevailed, still prevails,

Starting point is 01:36:57 when the name of Mr. James is mentioned in print. More English than the English, he only practiced what he preached, though tardily in the manner of his British naturalization. That he did not find all the perfections of his native land is a personal matter, but that he should be neglected in favor of mediocrity is simply the penalty of a great artist pays for his devotion to art. There is no need for indignation in the matter. Time writes such critical wrongs. Consider the case of stendal. the fiction of Henry James is for the future.

Starting point is 01:37:48 James seceded years ago from the English traditions, from Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. The wings of a dove, the ambassadors, the Golden Bowl, are fictions that will influence future novelist. In our own days, we see what a power James has been. a subtle breath on the waters of creation. Paul Borgate, Edith Varton, even Joseph Conrad, and many minor English novelists. His later work, say, beginning with the tragic muse,

Starting point is 01:38:31 is the prose equivalent of the seven arts and a revolutionary ferment. A marked tendency in the new movements is a throw overboard, superfluous technical banking. The James novel is one of grand simplifications. As the symphony was modified by lists into the symphonic poem and later emerged in the shape of the tone poem by Richard Strauss. So the novel of manners evolved from Flaubert's sentimental education, which despite its heavenly length contains in solution all that the newer men have accomplished. Zola patterned after it in the prodigious Rogon-McHart series. Doubted found therein the impression of the Sappho anticipated.

Starting point is 01:39:33 Mao Pesant and Eunzmanns dealt patiently and practiced characteristic variations. Flaubert is the father of realism as he is part of symbolism, his excessive preoccupation with style and his attaching esoteric significance to words sound the note of symbolism. Now, Henry James disliked sentimental education. Like other great critics, he has his blind side. yet he did not fail to benefit from the radical formal changes introduced by Flaubert, changes as revolutionary as those of Wagner in the music drama. I call the later James novel a simplification. All the conventional chapter endings are dispensed with.

Starting point is 01:40:35 Many are suspended cadences. The accustomed and thrice, barren modulations from event to event are swept away. Unprepared dissonances are of continual occurrence. There is no descriptive padding that bane of second-class writers, nor are we informed at every speech of the name of a character. This elliptical method James absorbed from Flaubert, while his sometime oboeuvre, oblique psychology is partially derived from Stendhal. Indeed, without Stendahl, both Meredith and James would have been sadly shorn of their psychological splendor. Nor is the shadow of Turgenef

Starting point is 01:41:29 missing, not the mention that of Jane Austen. Possibly the famous third manner of James was a result of his resorting to dictation, the pen inhibits where speech does not. These things made difficult reading for a public accustomed to the hypnotic passes of successive fiction-mongers. In James, nothing is forestalled. Nothing is obvious. One is forever turning the curve of the unexpected. The actual story may be discouraging in its bareness, yet the situations are seldom fantastic. The turn of the screw is an exception. You rub your eyes as you finish, for with all your credulity, painful is the intensity.

Starting point is 01:42:28 You have assisted at a pictorial evocation, both picture and evocation, reveal magic in their misty attenuations. And there is the ever-trium of poetic feeling over banal sediment. The picture in Millie Theella and Maggie Verver is clairvoyant. Millie's life is a miracle. Her ending art superlative. The wings of a dove is filled with a faintly audible tread of destiny behind the auras of life. The reverberations are almost microphonic with here and there a crescendo or a climax. The spiritual string music of Henry James is more thrilling to the educated ear than the sound

Starting point is 01:43:23 of the big drum and the blaring of trumpets. The implacable curiosity of the novelist concerning causes that do not seem final have been amply dealt with by Mr. Bromnell. The question whether his story is worth the telling is a critical impertinence too often uttered. What most concerns us now, in the James case, is his manner, not his matter. All the rest is life. As far as his middle period, his manner is limpidity itself. The latter style is a jungle of inversions.

Starting point is 01:44:09 suspensions, elysions, repetitions, echoes, transpositions, transformations, neologisms in which the heads of young adjectives despairingly gaze from afar at the verbs which come thundering at the close of sentences leagues long. It is a bewildering, but more than. bewildering in this particularly individual style when draughted into smooth journalistic prose. Nothing remains. Henry James has not spoken.

Starting point is 01:44:55 His dissonances cannot be resolved except in the terms of his own matchless art. His meanings evaporate when phrased in our vernacular. This may prove a lot of negating things, or it may not. Why prose should lag behind its sister arts, I can't say. Possibly because every pot-house politician is supposed to speak it. For that matter, anyone who has dipped into the well of English undefiled 17th century literature must realize that nowadays we write a parlous prose. However, it is not a stately prose that James essayed.

Starting point is 01:45:45 The son of a metaphysical and moralist, the writings of Henry James, the elder, are far from negligible. The brother of the greatest American psychologist, the late William James of brilliant memory, It need hardly be added that character problems are of more interest to this novelist than the external qualities of rhetorical sonority or fascination of glowing surfaces. You can no more read aloud a page of James than you can read aloud de Gaunt for Flout Bert, who modeled his magnificent prose harmonies,

Starting point is 01:46:31 On the Old Testament, Shakespeare, Bosuit, and Sonnaubriand, the final test of noble prose is the audible thereof. Flaubert called it spouting. The James prose appeals rather to the inner ear. Nuance and overtones, not dazzling tropical hues of rhythmical variety. Henry James is a law unto himself. His novels may be a precursor of the books our grandchildren will enjoy when the hurly-burly of noisy adventure, cheap historical vapidits,

Starting point is 01:47:19 and still cheaper drawing-room studderings shall have vanished. But like the poor, the stupid reader, we shall always have with us. In the fiction of the future, a more composed. complete synthesis will be attained. An illuminating essay by Arthur Simon's places George Meredith among the decadence, the murders of the mother tongue, the men who shatter syntax to serve their artistic needs. Henry James belonged to this group for a longer time than the majority of his critics suspected. In his ruthless disregard for the niceties and conventionalities of sentence structure,

Starting point is 01:48:11 I see the outcome of his dictation. Yet, no matter how crabbed and involved is his page, a character always emerges from the smoke of his muttered enchantments. The chief fault is not his obscurity, his prose. like the prose of Browning Sordello is packed with too many meetings, but that his character always speaks in Puris Jacobian. So do the people in Balsnake's crowded electric world? So the man and women of Dickens and Meredith. It is the fault or the virtue of all subjective of genius, however, not to fault or virtue of Flaubert or Turgeneuf or Tolstoy.

Starting point is 01:49:11 All in all, Henry James is a distinctly American novelist, a psychologist of extraordinary power in divination. He has pinned to paper the soul of the Cosmopolitan. The obsession of the moral problem that we feel in Hawthorne is not missing. Be his manner never so cryptic. His deep-veined humanity may be felt by those who read him. His Americans abroad suffer a deep sea change, a complete gamut of achieved sensibility divides Daisy Miller from Maggie Vernever. Henry James is a faithful secretary to society.

Starting point is 01:50:03 The phrase is Balzix to the American afloat that is native mooring as well as at home. In his exquisite notations are the glory of English fiction. Section 2 of Chapter 5, a note on Henry James. Before me lies an autograph letter from Henry James to his friend, Dr. Rice. It is dated December 26, 1904. In the address, 21 East 11th Street, it thus concludes, I am not one of the Bostonians, but was born in the city April 15, 1843. Believe me, truly yours, Henry James. Although he died a naturalized Englishman, there's seems to be some confusion as to his birthplace in the minds of his English critics.

Starting point is 01:51:05 In Ford Maddox-Hufner's critical study, Henry James, we read on page 95 that the life of James, quote, began in New England in 1843, unquote. He was born in America in 1843, then a land where culture was rare. That delightful condescension in foreigners is, still existed. Now this isn't such a serious matter for Henry James was a citizen of the world, but the imputation of a New England birthplace does matter because it allows the English critic and how many others to perform variations on the theme of Puritanism, the puritanism of his art. James, as a temperamental Puritan, one is forced to capitalize the unhappy world. Apart from the fact that there's less Puritanism in New England than in the

Starting point is 01:52:07 Middle West, James is not a Puritan. He does not possess the famous New England conscience. He would have been first to repute that notion. For him, the Puritan temperament has a faintly acrid perfume. To ascribe to Puritanism, the seven deadly virtue, Jews in refinement, sensibility, intellectuality is a common enough mistake. James never made that mistake. He knew that all the good things of life are not in the exclusive possession of the Puritans.

Starting point is 01:52:46 He must not be identified with the case he studies. Strictly speaking, while he was on the side of the angels, like all great artists, he is not a moralist. Indeed, he is our first great immoralist, a term that he has supplanted the old-fashioned amoralist. And he wrote the most immoral short story in the English language, one that also sets the spine thrilling because it's supernatural element as never did Poe or de malpresent.

Starting point is 01:53:24 Another venerable witticism, which has achieved the pathos of distance, was made a quarter of a century ago by George Moore. Mr. Moore said, Henry James went to France and read Turgeneuf V. W. Howells stayed at home and read Henry James. To land poigancy to this mild epigram, Mr. Hufner misquotes it, substituting the name of de maupazant for Turkenev's, a rather uncanny combination, Henry and Guy. A still more aged wees bobs up in the pages of Mr. Hewfer. Need we say that it recites the ancient saw about William James, the fictionist, and his brother Henry, the psychologist. None of these things is at least true, with the prudishness and peanut piety of Puritanism, Henry James has nothing in common.

Starting point is 01:54:39 He did not alone read Turgenev. He met him and wrote of him with more sympathy and understanding than he did of Flaubert or Badalera. And Mr. Howells never wrote a page that resembled either the Russians or the American, fiction. Furthermore, James is a masterly psychologist and tale teller. To the credit of his latest English critics, this is acknowledged and generously. Mr. Hoover is an accomplished craftsman in many literary fields. He writes with authority, though too often, in a superlative key. But how James would have winced when he read Mr. Hoofer's book that he is or was the greatest of living men. This surely is a planet-struck phrase.

Starting point is 01:55:38 The who first study is stuffed with startling things. He bangs Balzac over the head. He tells the truth about Flaubert, whose sentimental education is an entire human comedy. He thinks ill of big business, that business and whatever takes place downtown or in the city is simply not worth the attention of an intelligent being. It is a matter of dirty little affairs incompetently handled by men of the lowest class of intelligence. But all this is a volume about the most serene and luminous intelligence of our times. Mr. Hoyfer also goes for James as a critic. He wanted to be a critic. He wanted to dared to couple the name of odious George Eliot with Flaubert's. It does rather take the breath away,

Starting point is 01:56:38 but after all, didn't the tolerant and Catholic critic, who is Henry James, say that no one is constrained to like any particular kind of writing? As to the cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats, all human life is there. Of the Madonna of the future, We need not take the words as a final message, nor are the other phrases quoted. The soul is immortal certainly, if you've got one, but most people haven't. Pleasure would be right, if it were the pleasure right through. But it never is. Mr. Hoofner says that James found English people who are just singularly nasty,

Starting point is 01:57:25 and you can say that after reading the sacred font. but he ends on the right note, and for a man to have attained to international rank with phrases intimately national is the supreme achievement of writers, a glory that is reserved only for the Danties, the Gautas, and the Shakespeare's, who nevertheless remain supremely national. neither Mr. Hoofner nor Miss West is in doubt as to the essential Americanism of Henry James. He is almost as American as Howells. Who is our Anthony Trollope plus style and vision?

Starting point is 01:58:14 And Trolopa, by the way, will loom larger in the future despite his impersonality and microscopic manner. The James art is Cerebral Comedy par excellence. To alter his own words, he plays his intellectual instrument to perfection. He is a portrait doubled by a psychologist. His soul is not a solitary pool in a midnight forest, but an unruffled lake, sun-smitten or cloud-shadowed, yet in whose depth there is a night. moving mass of exquisite living things. His pages reverberate with the under home of humanity.

Starting point is 01:59:03 We may not exactly say of him as Halzit, said of Walter Scott. His works taken altogether are almost like a new addition of human nature. But we can follow with the code of the same dictum. This is indeed to be an author, many more than the dozen superior persons mentioned by whose buns enjoy the James novels. His swans are not always immaculate, but they are not swans of the cesspool, to quote, Landor. There is never an odor of leaking gas in his premises, as he once remarked of the de unzio fiction. He has a cosmopolitan soul. There is no slouch in his spiritual gate. Like

Starting point is 01:59:59 Renan, he abhorred the horrible mania of servitude to be found in the writing of his realistic contemporaries. He does not always dot the eyes of his irony, a subversive irony, but the spiritual antenna, which he puts forth so tentatively, always touches real things, not conjectural. In what tactile sense he boasts. He beeps into the glowing core of emotion, but seldom describes it. His ears are for overtones, not for the brassy harmonies of the obvious of truths, flat and flexible. Yet what novel is, has kept his ear so close to Cotian happenings, and with what dignity and charm in his crumbling cadences.

Starting point is 02:00:56 Not even the virtuoso of the ugly Huzmonds, whom no writer of the past century ever rendered surfaces into such impeccable truth, with such implacable ferocity as is clear, valiant as James. Firstian in Thunder form no part of the James stories, which are like a vast whispering gallery, the dim reverberations of which fill the listening ear.

Starting point is 02:01:35 He is an auditive as well as visualist to employ the precious classification of the psychiatrists. His astute senses tell him of a world which we are only beginning to comprehend. He is never obscure, never recondite, but, like Browning, he sends a veritable multiplex of ideas along a single wire.

Starting point is 02:02:03 Mr. Howells has rightly said of him that it is not well to pursue the meanings of an author to the very heart of darkness. However, readers as a rule like their fiction served on a shiny plate. Above all, they don't like a story to begin in one key and end in another. If it's to be pork in molasses or hog in hominy, George Meredith's words, then let it be these delectable dishes through every course. But James is ever in modulation. He tosses his theme ball-wise in the air, and while,

Starting point is 02:02:46 While it spins and bathed in blue, he weaves a web of golden lace, and it is marvelously spun. He is more atmospheric than linear. His theme is shown form of a variety of angles, but the result is synthetic. Elizabeth Luther Carey has pointed out that he is not a remorseless analyst. He does not take the mechanism of his Marianette. apart, but lets us examine an incompleteness. As a psychologist, he stands midway between Stendhal and Turgeneff. He interprets feeling rather than fact. Like our sister planet the moon, he has his rhythmic movements of liberation. He then reveals

Starting point is 02:03:43 his other side, a profound human emotional one. He is not like all frosty intellect, but he holds in horror the facile expression of the sediments. It's only too easy to write for those avid of sentimentalism, or to express what Thomas Huxley calls sensualistic catervalling. In the large, generous curve of his temperament, there is room for all life, but not for a lean or lush statement of life. You may read him in a state of mellow exasperation, but you cannot deny his ultimate sincerity. There is no lack of substance in his densely woven patterns. For patterns, there are, through the figure, be difficult to piece out.

Starting point is 02:04:40 His route of emerald is elliptical. Follow him who dare. A wingy mystery. He is all vision. He does not always avoid naked issues. His thousand and one characters are significantly vital. He is not the shadow land of American fiction. Simply, his supreme tact of omission has dispensed with the entire banal apparatus of fiction as commonly practiced.

Starting point is 02:05:16 To use a musical example, his prose is like the complicated score of some latter-day composer, and his art like music is a solvent. He discards lumbering descriptions, antique melodramatics, set of elements and denoments in Macedonic structures. The sharp several of character is omnipresent. His very pauses are eloquent. He evokes. His harmonic tissue melts into harmonic perspectives. He composes in every tonality.

Starting point is 02:05:59 Continuity of impression is unfailing. When reading him sympathetically, one recalls the saying of Maurice Barras. For in the accomplice spirit, there is but one dialogue that between our two egos. the momentary ego that we all are in the ideal one for which we strive. For Jacobians, the interior dialogue with its secondary intention, marches like muted music through the pages of the latter period.

Starting point is 02:06:37 Henry James will always be a touchstone for the tasteless. End of Chapter 5 of Unicorns by James. Unicar. Chapter 6 of Unicorns. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Nancy Sulei.

Starting point is 02:07:04 Unicorns by James Hunaker, Chapter 6. Georges Sand. Quote, Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man, self-called, George Sand, unquote. Mrs. Brown. Who reads George Sand nowadays was asked at the time of her centenary? She was born 1804 and died 1876. Paris responded in gallant phrases. She was declared one of the glories of French literature.

Starting point is 02:07:34 Nevertheless, we are more interested in the woman in her psychology than in her interminable novels. The reason is simple. Her books were built for her day, not to endure. She never created a vital character. her men and women are bundles of attributes, neither flesh nor blood nor good red melodrama. She was a wonderful journalist. One is tempted to say the first of her sex and the first feminist. Mary Wallenstone Goodwin was a shriller propagandist, yet she accomplished more for the cause than her French neighbor,

Starting point is 02:08:06 not alone because she didn't smoke big cigars or wear trousers, but on general principles. In a word, Mrs. Goodwin didn't exactly practice what she preached, and George Sand did. For her there was no talk of getting the vote. Her feminism was a romantic revolt, not economic or political rebellion. George Sand should be enshrined

Starting point is 02:08:27 as the patron saint of female suffragism. By no means a deep thinker, for she reflected as in a mirror the ideas of the intellectual men she met. She had an enormous vogue. Her reputation was worldwide. We know more about her now. Stop.

Starting point is 02:08:45 Stop. We know more about her now, thanks to the three volumes recently published by Vadimir Karanine, the pen name of a Russian lady, Madame Karamoff, the daughter of Dimitri Staso. This writer has brought her imposing work, thus far over 1,700 pages, down to 1848, and as much happened in the life of her heroine after that, we may expect at least two more fat volumes. Her curiosity has been insatiable. She has read all the historical and critical literature dealing with sand. She has a firsthand from friends and relatives facts hitherto unpublished, and she is armed

Starting point is 02:09:24 with a library of documents. More, she has read and digested the hundred-odd stories of the fecund writer and actually analyses their plot, writes at length of their characters, and incidentally throws a light on her own intellectual process. Madame Karenin is not a broad critic. She is a painstaking historian. While some tales of sand are worth reading, the devil's pool, letters of a voyager, even Consuelo,

Starting point is 02:09:52 above all her autobiography, the rest is a burden to the spirit. Her facility astounds and also discourages. She confesses that with her writing was like the turning on of a water tap and the stream always flowed, a literary hydrant. Awaken her in the night and she could resume her task. She was the centrifugal temperament, hence the result in shallowness of her work. She had charm, she had style, serene, flowing, also tepid and fatuous, the style detested by Charles Baudelaire, and admired by Turgeneff and Renan and Luminet.

Starting point is 02:10:30 Baudelaire remarked of this bestseller that she wrote her chardeur as if they were letters and posted them. The style cul-in, praised by bourgeois critics, He abhorred, as it lacked accent, relief, individuality. Quote, she is the prudom of immortality, unquote. He said not a bad definition, and she is stupid, heavy, and a chatterer. She loves the proletarian. Stop.

Starting point is 02:10:59 Back up. Madame Caronine is not a broad critic. She is painstaking historian. Madame Caronine is not a broad critic. She is a painstaking historian. While some tales of sand are worth reading, the devil's pool, letters of a voyager, even Consuelo, above all her autobiography, time three. Madame Caronine is not a broad critic. She is a painstaking historian. While some tales of sand are worth reading, the devil's pool, letters of a voyager, even Consuelo, above all her autobiography,

Starting point is 02:11:55 the rest is a burden to the spirit. Her facility astounds and also discourages. She confesses that with her writing was like the turning on of a water tap. The stream always flowed, a literary hydrant. Awaken her in the night, and she could resume her task. She was of the centrifugal temperament, hence the resultant shallowness of her work. She had charm. She had style, serene, flowing, also tepid and fatuous, the style detested by Charles Bordelaire, and admired by Turgenev and René, and Lumené.

Starting point is 02:12:27 Budillard remarked of this bestseller that she wrote her chef-dove as if they were letters and posted them. The stile colon, praised by bourgeois critics, he abhorred as it lacked accent, relief, individuality. She is the prudom of immortality, he said. Not a bad definition. And she is stupid, heavy, and a chatterer. She loves the proletarian, and her sentiment is adapted to the intelligent wife of the concierge. and the sentimental harlot, which shows that even such a versatile critic as Baudelaire had his prejudices. The sweetness and nobility of her nature were recognized by all her associates.

Starting point is 02:13:17 Nietzsche is no less impolite. She derives from Rousseau. He might have added Byron. Also, she is false, artificial, inflated, exaggerated. Her style is of a variegated wallpaper pattern. She betrays her vulgarity and her ambition to expose her generous feelings. She is, like all romantics, a cold, insufferable artist. She wound herself up like a timepiece and wrote. Nietzsche, like his great master, Schopenhauer, was never a worshipper of the irresponsible sex. And her immortality? Per didon said that her books were more immoral than Zolas, because more insidious,

Starting point is 02:13:58 tainted as they are with false ideas and sentiments. Georges Saint immoral? What bathus! How futile her fist-shakings at conventional morality. As well say, Marie Carelli, or Eda, is immoral. This literature of gush and gabble is as dangerous to the morals of our time as the Ibson plays or ESOP's fables. Esop's fables.

Starting point is 02:14:26 Unreality, cheap socialism and sentiment of the downtrodden shop of girl. Stop, stop, stop. unreality, cheap socialism and sentiment of the downtrodden shop-girl are the stigmata of the sans school. She has written many memorable pages, many beautiful pages, such masters as Saint-Beouves, Balzac, Delacroix, Flaubert, Balanche, Aina, Dostoevsky and Turgenev have told us so. Her idyllic stories are of an indubitable charm, but her immorality, like her style, is old-fashioned. there is a dating mark even in immorality. For if, as Ibsen maintained all truths stale and die after two decades,

Starting point is 02:15:16 how much less life may be allowed a lie. Your eternal verities then may be as evanescent as last year's mist. Madame Caronine does not belong to the school of moral rehabilitation, so prevalent here and in England. She does not spare her subject, indeed, makes out a worse case than we had supposed. She is not a prude, and if, Critically, she is giving to discovering a masterpiece under every bush planted by that indefiniteable gardener, Georges Sand, Madame Carine does not belong to the school of moral rehabilitation, so prevalent

Starting point is 02:16:00 here and in England. She does not spare her subject, indeed, makes out a worse case than we had supposed. She is not a prude, and if critically she is given to discovering a masterpiece under every bush planted by that indefatigable gardener, George Sand. She is quite aware of George's flagrant behavior. That Madame Carine does not belong to the school of moral rehabilitation, so prevalent here and in England. She does not spare her subject. Indeed, makes out a worse case than we had supposed.

Starting point is 02:16:41 She's not a prude, and if critically, she is given to discovering a masterpiece under every bush planted by that indefatigable... I can't I get that word. Indefatigable. indefatible. Madame Carine does not belong to the school of moral rehabilitation

Starting point is 02:17:02 so prevalent here and in England. She does not spare her subject, indeed, makes out a worse case than we had supposed. She's not a prude, and if critically she is given to discovering a masterpiece under every bush planted by that indefatigable

Starting point is 02:17:17 gardener, George Sand, she is quite aware of George's flagrant behavior. The list of lovers is longer than one given by earlier biographers. Domafiz, a close observer of the novelist, observes that she had no temperament at all, thus corroborating the early testimony of Ina. This further complicates the problem.

Starting point is 02:17:40 She was not, then, a perverse pursuer of young genius, going about seeking whom she could devour and indulging in what Mother Church calls morose delegation, a cold devil la Felician ropes. I doubt this. maternal she was. I once described her as a maternal nymphomaniac, a metaphysical messalina. She presided at numerous artistic ush-cochement. She was, preeminently, the critical midwife to many poets, pianists, painters, composers, and thinkers. If she made some of them unhappy, she brought into the life of others much happiness. Matthew Arnold believed in her, so did the Brownings, Elizabeth and Robert. George Eliot admired her. She too was

Starting point is 02:18:25 rowing in the same kind of moral galley, but with heavier oars, and through the Sargossian seas of British prudery. So did the Brownings, Elizabeth, and Robert. George Eliot admired her. She too was rowing in the same kind of moral galley, but with heavier oars, and through the Sargosian seas of British prudery. In contact with the finest minds of her times, George Sand was neither a moral monster, nor yet the errant bohemian that legend has fashioned of her. She was a fond mother, and a deluxe delightful grandmother. She had the featherbed tremorment and soothed masculine nerves exacerbated by the cruel exigencies of art. Jewel of Forge would have said of her, Stability, Thy Name is Woman. She died in the odor of domestic sanctity,

Starting point is 02:19:15 mourned by her friends and the idol of the literary world. How account for her uprightness of character? Her abundant virtues, save one, she was as true as the compass to her friends, to her family. How account for her uprightness of character? Her abundant virtues, save one. She was as true as the compass to her friends and to her family. Either she has been slandered or else she has an anomaly in the moral world. How account for her uprightness of character, her abundant virtues, save one. She was as true as the compass to her friends, to her family. Either she has been slandered or else she is an anomaly in the moral world. In either case, we need a new transvaluation of morals. She was not made up of the stuff of courtesans. She refused to go to the devil. Like Espasia, she was an immoralist. As an artist,

Starting point is 02:20:19 she could have had social position, but she didn't crave it. She didn't crave notoriety. Paradoxical, as it may sound, notoriety was thrust upon her. Ed Noon, her chateau in Béry, there is usually a conglomeration of queer people, socialists, reformers, crazy dreamers, artists and poets, occasionally working men in their blouses. Of that mystic crew, Matthew Arnold could have repeated his famous, What a Set, which he disparagingly uttered about the Shelley Goodwin gatherings. George Sand was a normal woman. She preferred the society of men. With women, she was always on her guard, a cat sleeping with one eye open. her friendship with Madame D'Augue, the elective affinity of lists, soon ended.

Starting point is 02:21:19 She never summered in soft, sapphic seas, nor hankered after poetic Lucadian promontories. She never did approvingly quote the verse of Baudelaire, beginning, lo, the lesbians, their sterile sex advancing. She was a woman from top to toe, nor did she indulge often in casual, gallant adventures. Her affairs were romantic. with the author of Carmen, her spiritual thermometer registered at its lowest. She endured him just eight days. And Merrimet is responsible for the tasteless anecdote which he tells us his reason for leaving her. He saw her of a cold morning making the fire, her head in curl papers, and attired

Starting point is 02:21:59 in an old dressing gown. No passion could survive that shock and selfish prosper at once grew frigid. A French expression, Maysue Georges. She always had her heart to be. en caput, and she was incorrigibly naive. They called it idealism in those days, witness her affair with Dr. Pagayo in Venice, the first handsome Italian she met and fell in love with, and a down, a French expression may suit George. She always had her heart encapote, and she was incorrigibly naive. They called it idealism in those days, witness her affair with Dr. Cabello in Venice, the first handsome Italian she met and fell in love with

Starting point is 02:22:46 and allowed poor sick Alfred Dimmisset to return to Paris alone. Although she had promised his mother to guard him carefully, he was suffering from attack of Delirium Tramont in Venice. He had said of himself, I am not tender, I am excessive. He was. His name, unlike Keats, is writ in absent, not water. Nevertheless, you can rewerew.

Starting point is 02:23:10 read him. But the separation didn't kill him. He was 22, Georges, six years older. Their affair struggled about six months. Alfred Combsold himself with Rochelle, than many others. He was more poet than artist, more artist than man, and a pretty poor specimen of a man. He wrote the history of his love for Georges. She followed suit. This sphinx of the ink well was a journalist born. She used her lovers for copy, and for that matter, Byron and Gerta did the same. George always discoursed of her thirst for the infinite. It was only a species of moral indigestion. Every romance ended in disillusionment. Every romance ended in disillusionment. The one with Chopin lasted the longest, nearly ten years. She first met the pole in 1836, not in

Starting point is 02:24:10 1837, as the Chopinists believe. List introduced them. Later Chopin quarreled with List about her. Chopin did not like her at first. Blue stockings were not to the taste of this conventional man of the world. Yet he succumbed. He died of the liaison itself, rather than from the separation in 1847. Sand divined the genius of Chopin before many of his critical contemporaries. She had the courage and the wisdom to write that one of his tiny preludes contained more genuine music than much of Meyer beers. She had the courage and the wisdom to write that one of his tiny preludes contained more genuine music than much of Meyerbeer's mighty triumpting. Oh, shit. She had the courage and the wisdom to write that one of his tiny preludes contained more genuine music

Starting point is 02:25:08 than much of Meyerbeer's mighty trumpetings, and Meyerbeer ruled the world of music when she said this. The immediate cause of this separation, I hinted at in my early study of Chopin, Solange Sand, the daughter of Georges, was a thoroughly perverse girl. She not only flirted with the Chopin seeking to lure him from her mother, truly a Gallic triangle, but she is so contrived matters that her mother was forced to allow the intriguing girl to marry her lover, Clessinger, the sculptor. Clésanjay.

Starting point is 02:25:44 She don't know the paragraph. The immediate cause of this separation I hinted at in my early study of Chopin. Solange Sand, the daughter of George, was thoroughly the immediate cause of this separation I hinted at in my early study of Chopin. Solange Sand, the daughter of George, was a thoroughly perverse girl. She not only flirted with Chopin, seeking to lure him from her mother, mother, truly a gallic triangle, but she so contrived matters that her mother was forced to allow

Starting point is 02:26:17 the intriguing girl to marry her lover, Clésanger, the sculptor. In knowledge of this, Madame Sand kept from Chopin for a while because she feared that she would side with Solange. The knowledge of this, Madame Sand kept from Chopin for a while, because she feared that he would side with Solange. He promptly did so, being furious of the deception. He it was that broke with George, possibly aided her to by her nagging. He saw much of Solange and pecuniarily helped her young and unhappy household. He announced by letter to Georges the news that she was a grandmother. They occasionally corresponded.

Starting point is 02:26:58 Clayson Gé did not get on with his mother-in-law. She once boxed his ears. Paragraph. Clayson-Gay did not get along with his mother-in-law. She once boxed his ears. He drank, gambled, and brutally treated Solange. George Sain suffered the agony of seeing her daughter's life a duplicate of her own. Her husband, Francois Casimir de Vant, the debauched country squire, drank, was unfaithful

Starting point is 02:27:30 and beat her bett, beat her betimes. That Clésanjay did not get on with his mother-in-law. She once boxed his ears. He drank, gambled, and brutally treated Solange. George Sands suffered the agony of seeing her daughter's life a duplicate of. of her own. Her husband, Francois Casimir de Vand, a debauched country squire, drank, was unfaithful, and beat her betimes. He treated her dogs. He treated his dogs better. No wonder she ran away to Paris, there to live with Gilles Sando. She had married in 1822 and brought her husband

Starting point is 02:28:11 500,000 francs. But rain or shine, joy or sorrow, she did her daily stunt at her desk. She was a journalist and wrote by the sweat of her a copious soul. But rain or shine, joy or sorrow, she did her daily stunt at her desk. She was a journalist and wrote by the sweat of her copious soul. She was the rare possessor of the will to sit still, as metaphysicians would say. She thought with her nerves and felt with her brain. She was, morally speaking, magnificently disorganized. She was a subtle mixture of praise and poised.

Starting point is 02:28:52 and her autobiography is stuffed with falsehoods. She could help, she couldn't, she couldn't help falsifying facts, for she was an incurable sentimentalist. Ina was cruelly said that women writers write with one eye on the paper and the other on some man. I'll accept the Countess Hanhan,

Starting point is 02:29:13 who had one eye, George Sand, wrote with both eyes fixed on a man or men. Charity should cover a multitude of missteps, In her case, we don't know all. We know too much. Still, I believe she was more sinned against than sinning. Since the fatal day when our earliest answers says, da, start over. Since the fatal day when our earliest ancestors left the Garden of Eden, when Adam digged and Eve Span, there have been a million things that women were told they shouldn't attempt,

Starting point is 02:29:59 that is, not without the penalty of losing their womanliness or interfering with their family duties. But they continued, did these same refractory females, to overcome obstacles, leap social hurdles, make mock of antique taboos, and otherwise disport themselves as if they were free individuals and not petticoated with absurd prejudices. They loved, they married, they became mothers. Georges Sand was in the vanguard of this small army of Protestants against the prevailing moral code for woman only. Her unhappy marriage was a blazing bonfire of revolt. The misunderstood woman at last had her innings. Stans still, Sands stood for all that was wicked and hateful in the eyes of law and order. Yet compared with the feminine fiction of our days, Sands is positively

Starting point is 02:30:53 idyllic. She is one parent of the woman movement, unpalpable as her morals may prove to churchgoers, She acted in life what so many of our belligerent ladies urged to do. She is one parent of the woman movement, unpalatable as her morals may prove to churchgoers. She acted in life what so many of our belligerent ladies urge others to do and never attempt on their own account. George was brave, and George was Polyandrus. If she hadn't much temperament,

Starting point is 02:31:27 she had the courage to throw her bonnet over the windmill when she saw the man she liked, and if she suffered later, she, being an artist, made a literary asset of these sufferings. She is the true ancestor of the new woman. Her books were considered so immoral by her generation that to be seen reading them was enough to damn a man. Other males, other tales. Other tales.

Starting point is 02:31:51 She dared to live her own life, as the Ibsenites say, and she was the original Ibsen girl, proof before all letters. I haven't the slightest doubt that today she would speak to street crowds, urging the vote for women. Why shouldn't women vote? She might be supposed to argue. That she dared to live her own life, as the Ibsenites say, and she was the original Ibsen girl, proof before all letters.

Starting point is 02:32:22 I have in the slightest doubt that today she would speak to street crowds urging the women to vote. Why shouldn't women vote? She might be supposed to argue. There will be less dyspepsia in America when women desert the kitchen for the halls of legislation. Men perforce are better cooks. So, by all means, let women vote. Will it not be an acid test applied to our alleged democratic institutions? George Sand believed herself to be a social democrat.

Starting point is 02:32:50 She trusted in Pierre-Lauru's mysticism, trusted in the philanstery of Fourier, in the doctrines of Saint-Cimon, the latter especially because of her intimacy with Franz Liszt. Nevertheless, she might shudder at the emancipation of ideas in our century, and she has a sensitive soul. Modern democracy might prove for her a very delirium of ugliness.

Starting point is 02:33:14 She was always aesthetic. She could portray with a tender pen the stammering litany of young caresses, but she couldn't face a fact in her fiction. Her Indians, Lelaus, and other romantic insurgents against society, are bironic, laras and petticoats. All rose water and rage.

Starting point is 02:33:33 They are as rare in life as black lightning on a blue sky. Her stories are as sad and as ridiculous as a nightcap. Georgesand was not beautiful. Eduardo Grenier declares that she was short and stout. Her eyes were wonderful, but too close together. Do you recall Einis' phrase, Femme with lois-sendre? Black they were, those eyes, and they reminded Regnier of once of unpolished marble and velvet. Her nose was thick and not overly shapely. She spoke with great simplicity and her manner was very quiet. With these rather negative physical attractions, she conquered men like Napoleon. Even Prim, President Tierre, tried to kiss her, and with her indignation,

Starting point is 02:34:24 was epical. He is said to have giggled in a silly way when reproved. It seems incredible. Did you ever see Le Bonnet, portrait of this Philistine statement? Thé. Tap. Section 4. George Sand was not beautiful George Sand was not beautiful Edward Grenier declares that she was short and stout her eyes were wonderful but too close together

Starting point is 02:35:02 do you recall Einis phrase Femme with Lois-Saintre black they were those eyes and they reminded Grenier of once of unpolished marble and velvet her nose was thick and not overly shapely she spoke with great simplicity and her manner was very quiet

Starting point is 02:35:19 With these rather negative physical attractions, she conquered men like Napoleon. Even Prim presentier tried to kiss her, and her indignation was epical. She is said to have giggled in a silly way when reproved. It seems so incredible. Did you ever see La Bono Portrait of this Philistine statement? I cannot say that one. That! Your sound was not beautiful.

Starting point is 02:35:52 Hedroix Grenier declares that she was short and stout. Her eyes were wonderful, but a little too close together. Do you recall Einis' phrase, Femme with lo and sombre? Black they were those eyes, and they reminded Grenier once of unpolished marble and velvet. Her nose was thick, and not overly shapely. She spoke with great simplicity, and her manner was very quiet.

Starting point is 02:36:18 With these rather negative physical attractions, she conquered men like Napoleon. Even Presidentier tried to kiss her, and her indignation was epical. He is said to have giggled in a silly way when reproved. It seems incredible. Did you ever see the Bonin portrait of this Philistine statesman? Did you ever see the bonnet portrait of this Philistine statesman? List never wholly yielded to her.

Starting point is 02:36:44 Mary Mae despised her in his chilly fashion. Michel de Bourges treated her rudely. poor Alfred de Mise who when he was short of money would dine in an obscure tavern and with a toothpick in his mouth would stand at the entrance of some fashionable boulevard cafe seems to have loved her romantically the sort of love she craved what was her attraction she had brains and magnetism but that she could have loved all the lovers she is credited with is impossible there is to begin at the beginning joe sando who was followed by Dumisier, after him the deluge, Dr. Pagelo, who was jilted when he followed her to Paris, Mikhail de Bourge, Pierre-Lieu, Felicien, Marfie, Chopin, Merri-May, Monseau, and the platonic friendship with Flaubert. This was her sanest friendship, the correspondence proves it. She went to the Magnet dinners with Flaubert, Goncourt, Renan, Zola, Toganya Vendodé. Her influence on the grumbling giant of Croce was tonic.

Starting point is 02:38:02 It was she who should have written sentimental education. But where is that sly old voluptuary Saint-Beau, or the elder Dumas, the pasha of many tales, or Lest, who was her adorer for a brief period, notwithstanding Madame Caran's denial? She denies the Larue affair, too. Are these all? Who dare say? "'Douma Fis carried a bundle of Chopin's letters from Warsaw, and San buried them at Noan. "'This story, doubted by Dr. Nis, was been corroborated since by Madame Caronine,

Starting point is 02:38:39 "'but a loss for inquisitive critics. "'George was named Lucille Arre Du Pen, "'and she was descended from a choice chain of rowdy and remotely royal ancestors. "'In her mature years she became optimistic, proper, matronly. "'She was a cheerful milked cow for her two children. children. It is delicious comedy to read the warnings to her son Maurice against actresses. Solange, she gave up as hopelessly selfish, wicked for the sheer sake of wickedness, a sort of inverted and evil art for art. Nearly all the facts of the choral with Solange are to be

Starting point is 02:39:17 found in Sapio, nearly all the facts of the cora with Solange are to be found in Sapio Rochebelav's Georges Saint de Saffi. After Saint-Vange, Les Colise de Saffi, after Saint-Vange, Les Colise. she formed a literary partnership with the Marquis Alfieri, nephew to the great Italian poet. Soli opened a salon in Paris to which came Gambetta, Jules Farie, floque, Taina, Ervée, Gambita, Henri Fouquier-en-Vice, the critics who describe her as having the curved arabic nose of her mother and hair cold black. She too must write novels. She died at Noon, her mother's old home in 1890. Maurice Sand, her brother, died ten years earlier.

Starting point is 02:40:13 Jue, Clarit, tells an amusing story about Sand. In 1870, when she was old and full of honors, she went one day to visit the Minister of Instruction. There, being detained in the antechamber, she fell into a pleasant conversation with a well-groomed, decorated old gentleman. After ten minutes, chat the unknown consulted to his watch, and arose, and bowed to Madame Sand.

Starting point is 02:40:36 If I could always feel, find such a charming companion, I would visit the ministry often, he gallantly said and went away. The novelist called an attendant. Who is that amiable gentleman? she asked. Ah, that is Monsieur Gilles-Cendot of the French Academy. And here he, her first flame in Paris, inquired the name of a lady. What a lot of head-shaking and moralizing must have ensued. The story is pretty enough to have been written in the candid thunder of sand herself. De Lenza, author of several rather neglected volumes about musicians, did not like Sand because she was rude to him when introduced by Chopin. He asked her concierge, what is bad and properly called?

Starting point is 02:41:19 Do divan? Ah, monsieur, she has many names, was the reply. But it is her various names and not her novels that interest us, and will intrigue the intention of posterity. End of Chapter 6. Recording by Nancy Suley. Chapter number seven of Unicorns. This is a Libravox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Voice of Landis in Zanesville, you can find me at voiceoflandis.com.

Starting point is 02:42:03 Unicorns by James Hunaker, Chapter 7, The Great American Novel. Section 1 When the supreme master of the historical novel modestly confessed that he could do the big bow-wow strain, but to Jane Austen must be accorded the palm of exquisite craftsmanship, there was then no question upon the critical map of the so-called Great American novel. Sir Walter Scott, to whom such authors of historical novels as Chateau Breon and his martyrs, the Salambeau of Flobert, and that well-nigh-perfect-fiction, the history of Henry and Esmond by Thackeray, yield precedence might have achieved the impossible. The writing of a library,

Starting point is 02:42:47 epitomizing the social history of these states, as Walt Whitman would say, after Scott no name but Balzac's occurs to the memory. Balzac, who laid all France under his microscope and France is all of a piece, not the checkerboard of nationalities we call America. Even the mighty Tolstoy might have balked the job. And if these giants would have failed, what may be said of their successors? The idea of a great American novel is in absolute, and nature abhors in absolute, despite the belief of some metaphysicians to the contrary. Yet the notion still obtains and inquests are held from time to time, and the opinions of contemporary novelists are taken toll of, as if each man and women could give odd else but their own side of the matter. That side, which is

Starting point is 02:43:38 rightfully enough personal and provincial. The question is, after all, an affair for critics, and the great American novel will be in plural, thousands, perhaps. America is a court of many nations, and to find the keynote, we must play much and varied music. While a novelist may be cosmopolitan, at his own risk, a critic should be ever so. Consider the names of such widely contrasted critical temperaments as St. Bov, Tann, de Gormant, Matthew R. Arnold, Brondes, Swinburne, Arthur Simons, Havilock Ellis, Henry James, Ghosh, and W.C. Brunel. All cosmopolitan as well as national. The sublime tenuities of Henry James, like the black music of Michael Arzabashv.

Starting point is 02:44:24 Are questions largely temperamental, but the Russian is all Slavic, and no one would maintain that Mr. James shows a like-in-grained nationalism. Nevertheless, he is American, though dealing only with a certain side of American life. the cosmopolitan phase. At his peril, an American novelist sails eastward to describe the history of his countryman abroad. With the critic, we come upon a different territory. He may go gadding after new mud gods, the newest god invented by man is always the greatest, for the time being and returned to his native heath, mentally refreshed and broadened by his foreign outing. Not so, the maker of fiction. Once he cuts loose his balloon, he is in danger of not getting.

Starting point is 02:45:08 getting home again. Mr. James is a splendid case for us. He began in America and landed in England, there to stay. Our other felicitous example of cosmopolitanism is Henry Blake Fuller, the author of the Chevalier Pensiery Vani and the Chetalane de la Trinete, who was so widely read in the 90s. After those charming excursions into a rapidly vanishing Europe, Mr. Fuller reversed the proceeding of James. return to America and compose two novels of high artistic significance, the cliff dwellers and with the procession, which while they continued the realistic tradition of William Dean Howells, were also the forerunners of a new movement in America. It is not necessary to dwell now on the

Starting point is 02:45:56 last refuge or on that masterly book of spiritual parodies, the puppet booth. But Mr. Fuller did not write the great American novel. Neither did Mr. Howells nor Mr. James, who has to be a little. has. No one. Is there such a thing? Without existing, it might be described in Celtic fashion. This mythical work is pure fiction. Let us admit for the sake of argument that if it were written by some unknown monster of genius, it would like Lewis Carroll's snark turn into Boogham. Henry James has said that no one is compelled to admire any particular sort of writing, that the province of fiction is all life, and he also has wisely remarked that when you have no taste, you have no discretion, which is the conscience of taste. And may we add, when you have no

Starting point is 02:46:45 discretion, you perpetrate the shocking fiction with which America is deluged at this hour. We are told that the new writers have altered the old canons of bad taste, but plusa ashan's, pluse, la mimchos, a licorice sentimentality is the ever-threatening rock upon which the bark of young American novelist goes to pieces. Pardon the mixed metaphor. Be sentimental. The and you will succeed. We agree with Dostoevsky that in fiction as well as in life, there are no general principles, only special cases. But these cases could they not be typical, even if there are not types only individuals and are men and women so enthralled by the molasses of sentimentalism in life, have the motion pictures hopelessly deranged our critical values? I know that in America

Starting point is 02:47:34 charity covers a multitude of mediocrities. Nevertheless, I am loathed. to believe that all one reads in praise of wretched contemporary fiction is meant in earnest. Well, Sheikhan Ase Desjou, the thrilling detective story, the romantic sonorities of the ice cream soda, women novelist, with a triple-barreled name, as Rudyard Kipling, put it once upon a time, or that Church of Heavenly Anui, the historical novel. What a cemetery of ideas, all of them. An outsider must be puzzled by this tumult of tasteless writing

Starting point is 02:48:08 and worse observation. However, history and fiction may be a cavalcade of shining shadows, brilliant, lugubrious, dull, or joyful happenings, but where Thackeray succeeded, multitudes have failed. Who shall bend the bow of that Ulysses? Native talent, subtle and robust we possess in abundance. Thus far, it has cultivated with success its own parochial garden, which is, as it should be, the United States of fiction. America is cosmopolous. As to the Puritanism of our present novels, one may dare to say in the teeth of youthful Protestants that it is non-existent. The pendulum has swung too far the other way, and as literary artists are rare, the result has not been reassuring. Zola seems prudish after some experiments of the younger crowd, how badly they pull off the trick, how coarse and hard and heavy their touch.

Starting point is 02:49:03 Most of these productions read like stupid translations from a doll French original. They are not immoral, only vulgar. As old flabere used to say, such books are false. Nature is not like that. How keenly he saw through the humbug of free love, a romantic tradition of George Sands epoch, may be noted in his comment that Emma Bovary found in adultery all the platitudes of marriage.

Starting point is 02:49:30 That much despise stupid, venerable institution, marriage, how it has been flouted since the days of her so, the father of false romanticism and that stupefying legend, the equality of mankind, oh, the beautiful word equality, invented for the deletation of rudimentary minds. A century and more fiction has played with the theme of concubinage. If the Nacquette divorce bill had been introduced a decade or so before it was in France, what would have become of the theater of Dumas Fields? Or later, of the misunderstood woman in Ibsen's plays. All such tribal taboos make or unmake literature.

Starting point is 02:50:11 So merely as a suggestion to ambitious youngsters, let the novelist of the future in search of novelty describe a happy marriage, children, a husband who doesn't drink or gamble, a wife who votes yet loves her home, her family, and knows how to cook. What a realistic bombshell he would hurl into the camp of sentimental socialists,

Starting point is 02:50:32 and them that believe a wedding certificate is like Balzac's La Playa de Chagrin. A document daily shrinking in happiness. Absurdities make martyrs, but of all the absurd and ineffectual martyrdoms that of running off with another's wife is usually the crowning one. I don't call this very popular pie, said the little boy in Richard Grant White's story, and the man in the case is usually the first to complain of his bargain in pastry. However, categories are virtually an avowal of mental impotence, and all marriages are not made in heaven. In the kingdom of morality there are many mansions.

Starting point is 02:51:10 When too late you may sport with the shade, not in the shade of amorous, and perhaps elbow epigrams as a lean consolation. That is your own affair. Paul Verlaine has told us that Jevaecay anormament, though his living enormously did not prove that he was happy. from it. But he had at least the courage to relate his terrors. American novelists may agree with Dostoevsky that everything in the world always ends in meanness, or with Dr. Panglose, that all is for the best and the best of possible worlds, an affair of temperament. But don't mix the values, don't confuse intellectual substances. Don't smear a fact with treacle and call it truth. Above all, don't breach. Impiety is an indiscretion, yet don't be. Don't be. You don't

Starting point is 02:51:58 be afraid to tell the truth. From Jane Austen and Walter Scott, the parents of the modern English novel to many modern instances, fiction has thrived best on naked truth. All the rest is sawdust, tripe-selling and sentimentalism. Didn't Mr. Roundabout declare in one of his famous papers that figs are sweet, but fictions are sweeter? In our land we can't get the latter, sweet enough. Altruism, brother of man, uplifting, these are the shibboleths of the novellas of the novellors. Couches, Societies, Prodigists. Section 3, J.K. Hewismans, declared that in the land of books there are no schools.

Starting point is 02:52:39 No idolism, realism, symbolism. Only good writers and bad. Whistler said the same about painting and painters. Setting aside the technical viewpoint of such dicta, we fancy that our bestsellers do not preoccupy themselves with the mere writing of their fictions, but they have developed a formidable faculty of preaching. Old-fashioned fiction that discloses personal charm

Starting point is 02:53:03 that delineates manners or stirs the pulse of tragedy, not melodrama, is vanishing from publishers' lists. Are there not as many charming men and women perimulating the rind of the planet as there were in the days when Janice Austin or Howells or Turgenev wrote? We refuse to believe they're not, but there's little opportunity in a word. no market for the display of these qualities.

Starting point is 02:53:29 The novel with a purpose, generally an unpleasant purpose, has usurped the rule of the novel of character and manners. Bonerxes, not Balzac, now occupies the paste-pored pulpit of fiction. I quoted Henry James to the effect that all life is the province of the novelist. Nevertheless, the still small garden wherein is reared the tender solitary flower does but ill represent the vaster, complicated forest of common humanity. The ivory tower of the cultivated egoist is not to be unduly admired. Rather, Zolas Later with its foul facts than a palace of morbid art.

Starting point is 02:54:08 With all the didactic side of our fiction is overdone, I set it down to the humbug about the masses, being opposed to the classes, truly a false antithesis. As if the French bourgeois were not a product, of the revolution, poor bourgeois, always abused by the novelist, as if a poor man suddenly enriched didn't prove, as a rule, the hardest taskmaster to his own class. Consider the new rich, what a study they afford the students of manners. A new generation has arisen, its taste, intelligence, and culture, its canned manners, canned music, preferably, pseudo-African, canned art,

Starting point is 02:54:49 canned food, canned literature, its devout. It's devout. It's devout. devotion to the mediocre. What a field for our aspiring young secretaries to society. Cheap prophylactics, political and religious for religion, is fast being butchered to make the sensational evangelist's holiday are in vogue. They affect our fiction mongers who burn to avenge wrongs, write novels about the downprodden masses and sermons on social evils. Evil's that have always existed, always will exist, like the knife grinder, stories. they have none to tell. Why write fiction or what they are pleased to call fiction? Why not join the brave brigade of agitators and pamphleteers? Delay preachers are carrying off the sweepstakes. For them,

Starting point is 02:55:35 Mr. Howells is a superannuated writer. Would there were more like him in countenance of speech, wholesomeness of judgment, nobility of ideals, and in the shrewd perception of character? Fiction 2 is a fine art, though this patent fact has escaped the juvenile Paul Prize, who are mainly endeavoring to arouse class against mass. It's an old Dodge, this equality theory, as old as Beaselbubb Lord of Flies, when all fruit fails, welcome envy and malicious slandering. When you have nothing else to write about, attack your neighbor, especially if he hath a much-coveted vineyard.

Starting point is 02:56:13 Max Sterner, least understood of social philosophers, wrote, mind your own business. And he forged on the anvil of experience a mighty leading motive for the conduct of life. But our busy little penmen don't see in this golden motto a sufficient sentimental appeal. It doesn't flatter the masses. Mr. Brian a few years ago told us that we were all middle class. What is middle class? In Carlisle's day it was a gig man.

Starting point is 02:56:42 In ours it's the owner of a fliver? But in the case of snob versus mob, snob always wins. This twaddle about democratic art is the pain of our literature. There's only good art. Whether it deals with such democratic subjects as Lausamoire or Germany-Lay Sartou, or such aristocratic themes as those of Deonzieo and Paul Borgie, it is the art thereof that determines the product. I hold no brief for the sterile fiction that is enrolled under the banner of art,

Starting point is 02:57:13 for art. I go so far as to believe that a novelist with a beautiful style often allows that style to get in the way of human nature. Stained glass windows have their use, but they falsify the daylight. A decorative style may suit pseudo-medieval romances, but for 20th century realism it is sadly amiss. Nor is the arterioschlorotic school of psychological analysis to be altogether commended. It has been well-nigh done to death by Stendhall, Meredith, James, and Bourget, and it is as cold as a star. Flobert urged as an objection to writing a novel, proving something that the other fellow can prove precisely the opposite. In either case, selection plays the role. The chief argument against the novel, with a purpose, as the jargon goes, is its lack of validity, either as a document or as art.

Starting point is 02:58:09 A novel may be anything, but it must not be polemical. Zola has been, still is, the evil genius of many talented chaps who sling ink, not to make a genuine book, but to create a sensation. Such writers lack patience, art, and direction. They always keep one eye on the box office. Indeed, the young men and women of the day who are squandering upon paper, their golden genius, painfully resemble in their productions, the dime novels, once published by the lamented beetle,

Starting point is 02:58:40 or the lucubrations in the Saturday weeklies of long ago. But in those publications there was more virility. The heroes then were not well-dressed Nambi-pambies. The villains were villainous. The detectives detected real crimes. And were not weavers of metaphysical abstractions like your latter-day miracle workers of an impossible Scotland yard. And the girls were girls.

Starting point is 02:59:04 Neither neurasthenic nor did they outgolf all creation. The new novelists still deep. with the same raw material of melodrama, their handling of love episodes has much of the blaring brass quality of old-fashioned Italian opera. They loudly twang the strings of sloppy sentiment which evoke not music but mush and moonshine. And these are our motion masters today. Section 4. There can be no objection to literature and life coming to grips. Letters should touch reality. Many a sturdy blow has been struck at abuses by penmen masquerading behind fiction. No need to summon examples, as for realism, I deny there are commonplace people.

Starting point is 02:59:49 Only those writers are commonplace that believe in the phrase, and is one of the paradoxes of art that the commonplace folk of Thackeray, Flobert or Anthony Trollope, who delight us between covers, would in life greatly bore us. The Anui is artistically suggested, though not experienced, by the reader. It is the magic of the novelist, his style and philosophy that make his creations vital. Dosjevsky says there are no old women. To be sure, he puts the expression in the mouth of the sensualist, Karamazov, and as a corollary, I maintain that nothing is uninteresting if painted by a master hand, from carrots to Chopin. As for the historical novel, there is sentimental education as a model. If you desire something epical in scale and charged with the modern ironic spirit,

Starting point is 03:00:39 a Flaubertian masterpiece, this book, with its daylight atmosphere, the inimitable sound, shape, gait, and varied prose rhythms of its sentences, its marvelous gallery of portraits executed in the Dutch manner of halls and Vermeer, its nearness to its environment, and its fidelity to the pattern of life, it is a true historical novel, for it is real, to employ the admirable simile of Mr. Howells. No need to transpose the tragic gloom of Arts of Ashev to America. We are an optimistic people, thanks to our air and sky, political conditions and the immigration of sturdy peasant folk.

Starting point is 03:01:19 Yet we, too, have our own peculiar gloom and misery and social problems to solve. We are far from being the shadowland of fiction, as a certain English critic said. When I praise the dissinantial art of Michael Arzabashif, it is not with the idea that either his style or his pessimism should be aped. That way unoriginality lies, but I do contend that in the practice of his art, its sincerity, its profundity, he might be profitably patterned after by the younger generation. Art should elevate as well as a muse. Most fiction always be silly and shallow? It need be neither sordid nor didactic.

Starting point is 03:01:59 William James put the matter in a nutshell when he wrote that the whole atmosphere of present-day utopian literature tastes mockish and dishwatery to people who still keep a sense of life's more bitter flavors. And on this fundamentally sound note I must end my little sermon, for I find that I have been practicing the very preaching against which I warned embryo-novelists. But then, isn't every critic a lay preacher? End of Chapter 7. Recording by Voice of Landis, Zanesville. You can find me at Voiceoflandis.com. Chapter 8 of Unicorns. This is a Librivox recording.

Starting point is 03:02:43 All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org. Recording by Mattabrachich. Unicorns by James Hunaker. Chapter 8. The Case of Paul Seizan. The case of painter Paul Sazan. Is he a stupendous nobody, or a surpassing genius?

Starting point is 03:03:08 The critical doctors disagree, an excellent omen for the reputation of the man from Provence. We do not discuss a corpse, and though Sazan died in 1906, he is still a living issue among artists and writers. Every exhibition calls forth comment, fair, unfair, ignorant, and seldom just. Yet the Sazan question, is it so difficult to resolve? Like Brahms, the Frenchman is often misrepresented. Brahms, known now as a romantic writing within the walls of accepted forms, neither a pedant nor a revolutionist, Saisan, not a revolutionist, not an innovator,

Starting point is 03:03:49 vastly interested in certain problems, has been made Chef de Kohl, and fathered with a lot of theories which would send him into one of his famous rages if he could hear them. Either a revolutionist or a plagiarist, cried Paul Gogh, whose work was heartily detested by Cézanne. But truth is ever mediocre, whether it resides at the bottom of a well

Starting point is 03:04:12 or swings on the cusps of the new moon. What is the truth about Cézanne? The question bobs up every season. His so-called followers raise a clamor over the banality of representation in art, and their master is the one, One man in the history of art who squandered on canvas startling evocations of actuality, whose nose was closest to the soil.

Starting point is 03:04:37 Huismans was called an eye by Remy de Guermont. Paul Saisanne is also an eye. In 1901, I saw at the Chande de Marse salon a picture by Maurice Denny, entitled Omages Sazan, the idea of which was manifestly inspired by Manei's homage of Fantine Latour. The canvas depicted a still life by Cézanne on a chevalet and surrounded by Bonnard, Deni, Redon, Russell, Serousier, Vuyat, Melirio and Volar. Himself, as they say in Irish, is shown standing and apparently unhappy, embarrassed. Then came the brusque apotheosis of 1904 at the autumn salon, the most revelatory of his unique gift thus far made. Puy Vé de Chauvin had a special sal, so had Eugène Carrier.

Starting point is 03:05:31 Saisanne held the place of honour. The critical press was hostile, all half-hearted. Poor Saisan, with his naive vanity, seemed dazzled by the uproarious championship of Lejeune, and, to give him credit for a peasant-like astuteness, he was rather suspicious and always on his guard. He stolidly accepted the frantic homage of the youngsters, looking all the while like a bourgeois Buddha.

Starting point is 03:05:58 In the sun of 2001, 1904 and 1906, the latter the year of his death, appeared my articles on Cézanne, among the first, if not the first, that were printed in this country. Since then he has been hoisted to the stars by his admirers, and with him have mounted his prices. Why not?

Starting point is 03:06:18 When juxtaposed with most painters, his pictures make the others look like linoleum, or papillé-mache. He did not occupy himself, as did Manet, with the manners, ideas, and aspects of his generation. In the classic retort of Manet, he could have replied to those who taunted him with not finishing his pictures. Sir, I am not a historical painter. Nor need we be disconcerted, in any estimate of him, by the depressing snobbery of collectors who don't know B from a bull's foot, but who go off at half trigger when a hint is dropped about the possibilities of a painter

Starting point is 03:06:56 appreciating in a pecuniary sense. Cézanne is the painting idol of the hour, as were Manet and Monet a decade ago. These fluctuations must not distract us, because Cabernel, Bojaro and Hena, too, were idolized once upon a time, and served to make a millionaire's holiday by hanging in his marble bathroom. It is the undeniable truth that Cézanne has been. become a tower of strength in the eyes of the younger generation of artists which intrigues critical fancy. Sincerity is strength. Cézan is sincere to the core, but even stark sincerity does not necessarily imply the putting forth of masterpieces. Before he attained his original synthetic

Starting point is 03:07:40 power, he patently studied Delacro, Corbe and several others. He achieved at times the foundational structure of Corbe, but his pictures, so say his enemies, are son's composition, son's linear pattern, son's personal charm. But, popularities for dolls, cried Emerson. Seizance was a twilight soul, and a humorless one. His early modelling in paint was quasi-structural, always the architectural sense, though his rhythms are elliptical at times, and he betrays a predilection for the asymmetrical. Nevertheless, a man who has given to an art in two dimensions the illusion of a third, tactile values are here raised to the nth degree. His colour is personal and rhythmic. Hoismunds was clairvoyant when, nearly a half century ago, he spoke of Cézanne's work as

Starting point is 03:08:36 containing the prodromes of a new art. He was absorbed in the handling of his material, not in the lyric, dramatic, anecdotic or rhetorical elements. His portraits are vital and changed with character, and he often thinks profoundly on unimportant matters. When you are young, your foreground is huddled. It is the desire for more space that begets revolutionists, not unlike a big man elbowing his way in a crowd. Lordable then are all these sporadic outbursts, and while a creative talent may remain In provincial, even parochial, as was the case with Sazan, a critic must be cosmopolitan or nothing. An artist may stay rooted in his own bailiwick his life long, yet paint like an angel, but

Starting point is 03:09:25 a provincial critic is a contradiction in terms. He reminds one of a razor so dull that it can't cut better. Let us therefore be hospitable to new ideas. Even Cabernel has his good points. The tank of the town is not in Cézanne's portraits of places. His leaden landscapes do not arouse to spontaneous activity a jaded retina fed on Fortuny, Monticelli, or Monet. As for the groups of bathing women, how they must wound the sensibility of George Moore, Professor

Starting point is 03:09:59 of Energy at the University of Herotica. There is no sex appeal, merely women in their natural pelt. It is related of the Empress Eugenie that in front of Corbe's Lesbaniers, Salon 1853, she asked, "'Ese also en percheron?' Of the heavy planked percheron breed of horse are the ladies on the canvases of Caesar. The remark of the Empress appealed to the truculent vanity of Corby. It might not have pleased Caesar. With beauty, academic or operatic, he had no traffic.

Starting point is 03:10:34 If you don't care for his graceless news, you may console yourself that there is no disputing tastes with the tasteless. They are uglier than the females of Daegar, and twice as truthful. We have seen some of his still-life pieces so acid in tonal quality as to suggest that divine dissonance produced on the palate by a slightly stale oyster, or akin to the rancid note of an oboe in a score by Stravinsky. But what tri-suttle sonorities, what colour cores are in his best work? I once wrote in the promenades of an impressionist that his fruits and vegetables savour of the earth. Chardin interprets still alive with realistic beauty. When he painted an onion, it revealed a certain grace.

Starting point is 03:11:23 For long would have dramatized it. When Cézanne painted one, you smelt it. A feeble witticism, to be sure, but it registered the reaction. on the sounding board of my sensibility. The supreme technical qualities in Cézanne are volume, ponderability and an entrancing color scheme. What's the use of asking whether he is a sound draughtsman? He is a master of edges and a magician of tonalities.

Starting point is 03:11:49 Hoisman spoke of his defective eyesight, but disease boasts its discoveries, as well as health. The abnormal vision of Cézanne gave him glimpses of a reality denied to other painters. painters. He advised Emil Bernard to look for the contrasts and correspondences of tones. He practiced what he preached. No painter was so little affected by personal moods, by those variations of temperament dear to the artist. Had Cézanne the temperament that he was always talking about? If so, it was not decorative in the accepted sense. An unwearying experimenter, he seldom finished

Starting point is 03:12:28 a picture. His morose landscapes were. were usually painted from one scene near his home at Eakes. I visited the spot. The pictures do not resemble it, which simply means that Cézanne had the vision, and I had not. A few themes with polyphonic variations filled his simple life. Art submerged by the apparatus, and he had the centripetal, not the centrifugal temperament. In his rigid, intense ignorance, there was no room for climate, personal charm, not even for sunshine. Think of the blazing blue sky and sun of Provence, the romantic, semi-tropical riot of its vegetation, its gamuts of green and scarlet, and search for this mellow richness and misty golden air in the pictures of our master.

Starting point is 03:13:18 You won't find them, though a mystic light permeates the entire series. The sallow sublime. He did not paint portrait of Provence, as did a visual. He did not paint portrait of Provence, as did a Dorday in Numerumostan, or Bizet in La Lesienne. He sought for profounder meanings. The superficial, the facile, the staccato, and the brilliant repelled him. Not that he was an abstract painter, as the jargon goes. He was eminently concrete. He plays a legitimate tromple-olet on the optic nerve. His is not a pictorial illustration of Provence, but the slow, patient delineation by a geologist of art of a certain hill on old mother earth, shamelessly exposing her bare torso, bold rocky pate and graveled feet. The illusion is not to be

Starting point is 03:14:11 escaped, as drab as the orchestration of Brahms, and as austere in linear economy, and as analytical as Stendal-Aribsen, Saisan never becomes truly lyrical, except in his still life. Upon an apple he lavishes his palate of smothered jewels, and, as all things are relative, an onion for him is as beautiful as a naked woman, and he possesses a positive genius for the tasteless. The chiefest misconception of Sazan is that of the theoretical fanatics, who not only proclaim him their chief of school, which may be true, but also declare him to be the greatest painter that ever wielded a brush since the Byzantines. The nervous, shrinking man I saw at Paris would have been astonished at some of the things printed since its death. While he yearned for the publicity of the official

Starting point is 03:15:06 salon, as that Zola for a seat in the academy, he disliked notoriety. He loved work, above all, solitude. He took with him a fresh batch of canvases every morning and trudged to his pet landscapes, the motive he called it, and it was there that he slaved to. He was there that he slaved to away with technical heroism, though he didn't kill himself with his labours, as some of his fervent disciples have asserted, he died of unromantic diabetes. When I first saw him, he was a queer, sardonic old gentleman in ill-fitting clothes, with the shrewd, suspicious gaze of a provincial notary, a rare impersonality, I should say. There is a lot of in-util talk about significant form by propagandists of the new aesthetic.

Starting point is 03:15:55 as if form had not always been significant, no one can deny Cézanne's preoccupation with form, nor Corbeys either. Consider the Ornan landscapes, with their sombre flux of forest, by the crassest realist among French painters, he seems hopelessly romantic to our sharper and more petulant modern mode of envisaging the world.

Starting point is 03:16:18 There is significant form and a solid structural sense. But Cézanne quite o'er-crow's, Corbe in his feeling for the massive. Sometimes you can't see the ribs because of the skeleton. Goethe has told us that because of his limitations we may recognize a master. The limitations of Paul Seizan are patent to all. He is a profound investigator, and if he did not deem it wise to stray far from the territory he called his own, then we should not complain, for therein he was monarch of all he surveyed. His non-convents. His non-convents. conformism defines his genius. Imagine reversing musical history and finding Johann Sebastian Bach

Starting point is 03:17:02 following Richard Strauss. The idea seems monstrous. Yet this, figuratively speaking, constitutes the case of Cézanne. He arrived after the classic romantic, impressionistic, symbolic schools. He is a primitive, not made like Puvie, but one born to a crabbed simplicity. His veiled, cool, harmonies sometimes recall the throb of a deep bass organ pipe. Oppositional splendour is there, and the stained radiance of a Bacian corral. The music flows as if from a secret spring. What poet asked, when we drive out from the cloud of steam, majestical white horses, are we greater than the first men, who led black ones by the main? Why can't we be truly Catholic in our taste? The heaven of art contains many mansions, and the rainbow more colours than one.

Starting point is 03:17:59 Paul Sazan will be remembered as a painter who respected his material, and as a painter, pure and complex. No man who wields a brush need wish a more enduring epitaph. End of Chapter 8. Chapter 9 of Unicorns This is a livery-box recording, or livery-box recordings are in the public domain, information or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org Unicorns by James Hunaker Chapter 9 Brahmsody

Starting point is 03:18:39 After Wagner the deluge? No, Johannes Brahms Wagner the high priest of the music drama, a great scene painter in tones Brahms, a wrestler with the dwellers on the threshold of the infinite a musical philosopher, but ever a poet. Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, cried Von Boulog, but he forgot Schumann. The molten tide of passion and extravagance that swept over intellectual Europe

Starting point is 03:19:13 three score year ago bore on its foaming crest Robert Schumann. He was first cousin to the Prince of Romanticists Heinrich Heine. Heine, who dipped his pen in honey and gall and sneered and wept in the same couplet. In the tangled, rich underwood of Schumann, the young Brahms wandered. There he heard the moon sing silvery, and the leaves rustle rhythms to the heartbeats of lovers. All German romance, fantasy, passion was in Schumann,

Starting point is 03:19:48 the Schumann of the Papillon and the Carnival. Brahms walked as did Dante with the shades. Bach guided his footsteps, Beethoven bade him glance aloft at the stars, and Brahms had for his legacy, polyphony, form and masterful harmonies. In his music, the formulist finds perfect things. Structurally, he is as great as Beethoven, perhaps greater. His architectonic is superb. His melodic content is his own, as he strides in stately pomp in the few, Alexandrines of Bach. Brams and Browning, Brahms and Freedom, Brahms and now. The romantic infant of 1832 died of intellectual anemia, leaving the world as a legacy, one of the most marvellous groupings of genius since Athens' sky carrolled azureglances to Pericles.

Starting point is 03:20:51 Then came the revolution of 1848, and later a race of sewer men sprang up from the mud. Flaubert, his face turned to the past, his feet to the future, gazed sorrowfully at Carthage, and wrote an epic of the bourgeois. Zola and his gang delved into Mongol cesspools, and the world grew a weary of the malodour. Chopin and Schumann, faint fading flowers of romanticism, were put in albums where their purple harmonies and subtle sayings are pressed into sweet twilight forgetfulness. Even Berlios, whose orchestral ozone revivified the scores of Wagner and List, even Mad Hector with the flaming locks sounded garishly empty, brilliantly superficial. The new man had arrived. A short stocky youth played his sonata in sea, his opus one, for Liszt, and the Magyar of Weimar returned the compliment by singing in archangelic tones his own fantasy in B minor, which he fondly and futilely believed a sonata. Brahms fell asleep, and Liszt was enraged. But how symbolic of Brahms,

Starting point is 03:22:18 to fall asleep at the very onset of his career fall asleep before list music it is the new wearied of the old the young fatigued by the guerrilities of age it is sad it is wonderful brams is of today he is the scientist term philosopher the philosopher turned musician if he were not a great composer he would be a great biologist a great metaphysician There are passages in his music in which I detect the philosopher in ophthalic meditation. Brahms dreams of pure white staircases that scale the infinite. A dazzling dry light floods his mind, and you hear the rustling of wings, wings of great terrifying monsters, hippogriffs of horrid mean, hieroglyphic faces, faces with stony stare managed your imagination. He can bring down within the compass of the octave moods

Starting point is 03:23:23 that are outside the pale of mortals. He is a magician, spectral at times, yet his songs have the homely lyric fervour and concision of Robert Burns. A groper after the untoward shudders at certain bars in his F-sharp minor sonata and weeps with the moonlit tranquility in the slow movement of the F minor sonata.

Starting point is 03:23:50 He is often dull, muddy-pated, obscure and maddeningly slow. Then a rift of lovely music wells out of the mist. You are enchanted and cry, Brahms, master, Anoint again with thy precious maledic chrism, Our thirsty eyelids. Brahms is an inexorable formulist. His four symphonies,

Starting point is 03:24:15 his three piano sonatas, the choral works and chamber music, are they not all living testimony to his admirable management of masses? He is not a great colourist. For him the pigments of Macart, Wagner and Theophile Gautier are as naught. Like Puvius de Chavonnais, he is a primitive. Simple, flat tints, primary and cool, are superimposed upon rhythmic versatility, and strenuousness of thought. Ideas, noble, profundity embracing ideas he has. He says great things in a great manner,

Starting point is 03:24:57 but it is not the smart, epigrammatic, scarlet, flashing style of your little man. He disdains racial illusions, he is a German, but a planetary Teuton. You seek in vain for the geographical hints, hintings that chain Greek to the map of Norway. Brahms' melodies are world-typical, not cabined and confined to his native Hamburg. This largeness, lack of polish, and of disregard for the polytesse of this art,

Starting point is 03:25:32 do not endear him to the unthinking. Yet what a master miniatrist he is in his little piano pieces, his intermetsy. There he catches the tenderest sense. sigh of childhood, or the intimate flutterings of the heart stirred by desire. Feminine he is as no woman composer, and virile as our few men, the sinister fury, the mocking, drastic fury of his first rhapsodies, true soul tragedies, how they unearthed the core of pessimism in our age. Pessimist? Yes, but yet believer, a believer in himself, the thus a believer in men and women he reminds me more of browning than does schumann the full-pulsed humanity the dramatic yes brahams is dramatic not theatric modes of analysis the flow glow and relentless tracking to their ultimate layer of motives is browning but the composer never loses his grip on the actualities of structure

Starting point is 03:26:42 after chopin brahms he gives us cooling deep draught in exchange for the sugared wormwood the sweet exasperated poison of the polish charmer a great sea is his music and it sings about the base of that mighty mount we call beethoven brahms takes us to the subterrain depths beethoven is for the heights strong lungs are needed for the company of both giants Brahms, the surgeon whose scalpel pierces the aches of the modern soul maladies. Bard and Healer, Beethoven and Brahms. End of chapter 9. Chapter 10 of Unicorns. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain.

Starting point is 03:27:32 For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Olivia. Unicorns by James Hunaker. Chapter 10, The Opinions of J.K. Hoismans. A monument should be erected to the memory of the inventor of playing cards, because he did something towards suppressing the free exchange of human imbecility. The Frenchman, Hoismans, who wrote this charming sentiment, was not necessarily companionable.

Starting point is 03:28:03 He was the most unpleasant among the world's great writers, for, as a great master of prose, he ranks high in the literature of his country. His detestation of the mediocre became a tormenting fixed idea. Like Flaubert, a neurotic, his digestive organs in dyspeptic condition, Hoisman pursued the disagreeable with the ardor of a sportsman tracking game. Why precisely such subjects appeal to him must be left to the truffle hunters of degeneration. Swift is in the same class, but Swift enjoyed scurifying his Yahoo's. Hoysmans did not, nor for that matter.

Starting point is 03:28:41 did Flaubert. The de Goncourtes have told us in their copious confidences the agony they endured when digging for documents. Germaini La Certeau was painful travail, not alone because of the torturous style it demanded, but also because of the author's natural repugnance to such vulgar material. They were aristocrats. Hoismans came of a solid bourgeois family. Dutch on the paternal side, his father hailed from Brida, and Parisians. on the distaff. Therefore, he might have described his modest surroundings with less acerbity than the irritable de goncourts. Such was not the case. He loathed his themes. He was unhappy while developing them. Perhaps the clairvoyance of hatred, which may be a powerful

Starting point is 03:29:31 incentive, forced his pen to the task. But the fact remains that, art and religion aside, Hoismans did not love what he transposed from life to his marvelously written pages. His was a veritable aesthetic of the ugly and hateful. Yet he possessed a nature sensitive to the pathological point. And, like Schopenhauer, he masked this undue sensibility with a repelling misanthropy. In a study of him by his disciple, Gustav Kouk. J.K. Horsemens, with an etched portrait by Raphaelie, we are shown some intimate characteristics. Hoismans never beat about the social ambush, but freely expressed his opinions concerning contemporaries.

Starting point is 03:30:16 Indeed, a phrase of the Goncourtz might have been his, Jevovamee, me contemporance. He has been called an exasperated Goncourt, which is putting it mildly. However, it must not be supposed that he was a roaring egotist, hitting out blindly. He seems, according to the account of Kou, and Remy de Gormand,

Starting point is 03:30:36 to have been an unassuming and industrious functionary in the Ministry of the Interior, and, even when aroused, not so truculent as sarcastic. The Dutch and Flemish base to his temperament endowed him with considerable phlegm. He was never demonstrative, disliked effusiveness in life and literature, and only in his ironical speech lurked the distilled bitterness of his prejudices. He had many. Yet, fearful of a literary career, with its poverty and disillusionments, he endured the unwee and fatigues of 32 years of office work,

Starting point is 03:31:14 and a model clerk, he was decorated when he left his bureau in the ministry, that is, decorated for his zeal and punctuality, not for his books. Numberless are the jokes made about the Legion of Honor, yet none contains such sub-acid irony as this one, hoistons the irascible, among decorated Philistines. quote, Perhaps it is only a stupid book that someone has mentioned, or a stupid woman,

Starting point is 03:31:41 as he speaks, the book looms up before one, becomes monstrous in its dullness, a masterpiece and a miracle of imbecility. The unimportant little woman grows into a slow horror before your eyes. It is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes, but the intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a touch of the sublime into the very,

Starting point is 03:32:04 expression of his disgust. Every sentence is an epigram, and every epigrams a reputation or an idea. He speaks with an accent as of pain surprised, an amused look of contempt, so profound that it becomes almost pity for human impicility, end quote. This tiny etched portrait is by Mr. Arthur Simmons, who practically introduced Hoisman's to English-speaking letters. Pidiless he was, as pitiless to himself as to others. yet Cocque found him entertaining betimes, while Des Gourmetz scoffs at his tales of stomach woe. Hoisman, he said, ate heartily in the very restaurants he so viciously abuses throughout that iliad of indigestion, Avalot. He was the Monsieur Follatant, the unheroic hero, as he was the unpatriotic hero of the knapsack, published in Zola's collection, Les Suis de Madan.

Starting point is 03:32:58 In all his books, he figures, Jules Le Martre describes them collectively as, a young man with a dysentery, a young man who disliked single blessedness, the critic used a stronger expression, a man who couldn't get a beefsteak in Paris cooked as he wanted it, and a man who liked to read the chaste chronicle of Gilles d'Ira, otherwise known as the sadistic blue beard.

Starting point is 03:33:23 These comprised the characters of hoistmen's. After his conversion, he made amends, though he was always the atrabilius fault finder. No matter, one of the most notable of art critics in a city abundantly supplied with criticism was this same hoistmans. His critical achievements may outlive his fiction and his religious confessions. He preferred Sartan to his other books. It is written in his most astounding and captivating style. The portraits of certain artists in this unique volume recite the history of the critics' acuity and clairvoyance. He, first announced Edgar de Ga as the greatest artist we possess today in France. He discovered Odelon

Starting point is 03:34:05 Réthelon, Raphaelie, Forain, and wrote of Gustave Morot in enameled prose. Whistler, Charette, Pizarro, Gogan were praised by him before they had attracted the pontifical disdain of academic criticism. To ropes, he consecrated some extraordinary pages. For Hoisman's was a verbal virtuoso superior to any of the artists he praised. And later he cynically confessed to Kouk that he didn't highly estimate the Belgian etcher, but found in him excellent pasture for his own picture-making pen. In a word, the erotic ropes attracted him more than ropes the everyday craftsman, and rightly enough. With the Japanese, this erotic side of ropes is only for the connoisseur. Hoisman said some just things of Whistler, and he was the first critic to salute

Starting point is 03:34:57 the rising star of Paul Seizan, who, he asserts, contributed more to the impressionist movement than Manet, and one who also discovered the podromes of a new art. This was as early as 1877. He found the Seizan's still life brutally real, above all, a preoccupation with forms and edges that betrayed this painter's tendency toward a novel synthesis. But, according to Kouk, Hoisman saw through the hole in the Cézon millstone. The provincial was a ruse, an intricate, and a money grubber in his old age, and proved his plebeian ancestry. His father began a barber, into debanker, shaved faces as well as notes, bled his clientele in both professions. American collectors of art, Hoismans treated as brigands. In the matter of the classical painters and sculptors, he manifested himself intransigent. He adored

Starting point is 03:35:53 the Flemish primitives, the School of Cologne, and a few of the Italian primitives, but, with the exception of Fra Angelico, found their types detestingly androgynous. He employed a more pungent term. In the low countries are the true primitives, he declared, as the only mysticism is that of John of the Cross and St. Teresa, Matea Grunewald's crucifixion is his idol. Hoistman's opinion of Pouvez de Chauvin in Céthin, is stimulating, though inconclusive. For him, Pouvet tries to dance a rigadoon at a requiem mass. But, as a descendant of Cornelius Horsman, the Parisian sees with almost an abnormal vision, and in prose paints like a veritable fleming. Little wonder, Des Cormant, called him an eye.

Starting point is 03:36:43 His prose is addressed to the eye rather than to the ear. Sumptuous in coloring, its rhythmic movement is pompous, its tone hieratic, and hector. he so manipulated it that it was a perfect medium to depict the Paris of his time. Hoisman did not think too highly of his brothers under the same literary yoke. His opinions are concise. Kou prints them. Despite his affiliations with Zola and a naturalistic group, Hoisman's soon tired of his chief, tired of his theories, his crude notions of art and life. He definitely broke away from him in his famous preface to La Ba. And it should not be forgotten that he was the first to celebrate in fiction, if celebration it may be called, the prostitute

Starting point is 03:37:27 of modern Paris. Marta appeared a year earlier than either Nana or La Fie Elise, the latter by Edmund de Goncourt. But he sickened of the sewer fiction only to dive deeper in the medieval vileness of Labarre. He met Goncourt through the offices of Leon Cladel, a writer little known to our generation. Hoismans was a friend in need to Bayards de Lisztes. Sladam and frequented the eccentric company of Barbé de Arevela, in whose apartment he said that Paul Borgate was apt to pop out of a closet or a cloak. He did not care for that cherubim of the Duchesses of the Favorg Saint-Antoine. Of Cornell, Racine, Moliere, Dante, Schiller, and Gerta, he spoke with ill-concealed contempt. Rassurs, all these solemn pontiffs. His major detestation was

Starting point is 03:38:20 Voltaire. Balzac, the prodigious novelist, left him unstired, not an artistic epithet, in his edition, 50 volumes long, and not a novelist easy to reread. Teofield Gautier did not attract him. He found the impeccable master cold and diluted, so many pages published to say nothing. Hoistman's believed in saying something, and for him it usually meant something disagreeable, or else contrary to accepted belief, he hated the theater, and his opinions of Scribe, Ogier, Dumafi, Sardot, Filidae, and of the old pedant Sarsay are savage. He had no feeling for the footlights, and not possessing much imagination, and deficient in what are called general ideas, that is, the stereotyped commonplaces of journalism and tenth-rate thinkers, he revolted at the

Starting point is 03:39:16 lean or hysterical stuff manufactured by dramatists, plays that are neither life nor literature, nor even theatrical. Baudelaire, the profoundest of soul explorers in the poetical parnassus of that period, appealed to Hoismans. He admired, as well he might, Flaubert, but found his company intolerable. That giant from Normandy was too healthy for the slender, overwrought Parisian. He had, so said Hoismans, the manners of a traveling salesman, Balzac's Guadisart, and would play his own homas, being addicted to punning and disconcerting joking. Poor Flaubert! Poor Hoismans! Such sensibility as his must have been a daily torture. Victor Hugo was an incomparable trumpet, an epic of the Guard National. From Edmund de Goncourt,

Starting point is 03:40:09 with his condescending heirs of Unveille, Mertre. He escaped by flight. And Turgenev, most amiable, of great men was a tedious Russian, a spigot of tepid water always flowing. If Verlaine had been penned up in hospital or prison, it would have been for the greater glory of French poetry. Jules La Foges, Quel joie. Remy de Gormant, I wrote a preface to one of his books, Le Latin mystique, that says enough. Marcel Provost, the Jun Premier de Romain de Georges Oment, which isn't bad. He rather evades a definite judgment of Anatol France. The style and thought of these two remarkable artists is antipodal. He calls Maurice Barre, Lord Beaconsfield, a high compliment to that exquisite writer's political attainments.

Starting point is 03:41:05 He sums up Ferdinand Bruniterre as Constipé, a sound definition of a shrewd, unsympathetic critic. Naturally, women writers, little geese, are not spared by this waspish misogynist whose intense, pessimistic vision deformed ideas as well as objects. In Aerebor, there is the account of a trip to London by the anemic hero Deciantis. He gets no further than one of the English taverns opposite the Gere San Lazare. It is risible this episode. Hoisman could display a verb and a sort of grim humor when he wished. Brinetteer, who was serious to solemnity and lacked a funny bone,

Starting point is 03:41:47 declared that Hoismans borrowed the incident from a popular vaudeville, La Voyage de Yep by Foulence and Waflard. He need not have gone so far afield, for in the life of Baudelaire by the Crepe, Eugene and Jacques, there is the genesis of the story. To become better acquainted with English speech and manners, Baudelaire frequented an English tavern in the Rue de Ravoli, where he drank whiskey, red punch,

Starting point is 03:42:15 and also sought the company of English grooms in the Faborg San Honore. Hoismunds loved Baudelaire as much as Brunetier detested him. There is no doubt he knew this thoroughly Bodilarian anecdote. A perverse comet in the firmament of French literature, George Karl Hoismans will always be more admired than loved. End of Chapter 10, recording by Olivia. 1. Stylists in prose are privileged persons. They may write nonsense and escape the castigation of prudish pedants. Or, dealing with cryptic subjects, they can win the favor of the unthinking.

Starting point is 03:43:31 Witness, in the brain carpentry of metaphysics, say, the verbal maneuvers of three such lucid, though disparate, thinkers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and William James. The names of these three writers are reduced as evidence that it is not necessary to be foggy of style, even when dealing with abstract ideas. And Germany has long been the Niebelhein of philosophy. Need we mention Hegel, whose commentators have made his meanings thrice confounded? Style in literature is an antiseptic. It may embalm foolish flies in its amber, and it is a brevet of immortality. That is, as immortality goes, a brief.

Starting point is 03:44:13 brief thing, but a man's boast. When the shoe-black part of the affair is over and done with, the grammar, which was made for school mams and male garb, and the shining rhetoric, what remains? The answer is eternal. Style cannot be taught. A good style is direct, plain, and simple. A writer's keyboard is at Humble Camel, the dictionary. Style, being concerned with the process of movement, has nothing to do with results.

Starting point is 03:44:43 results, says one authority, and an impertinent collusion on the part of the writer with his own individuality does not always constitute style, for individual opinion is virtually private opinion, notwithstanding its appearance in editions half a hundred long. St. Bourne de Quincey here occurred to the memory. Men change. Mankind, never. Too close imitation of the masters has its dangers for the novice. Apes and peacocks beset the way Stevenson's prose style is highly synthesized and a mosaic of dead men's manner He has no esoteric message beyond the expression of his sprite-like Whimsical Personality And this expression is, in the main, consummate

Starting point is 03:45:28 The lion in his pathway is the thinness of its intellectual processes As in to Quincy's case A master of the English language beyond compare Who in the region of pure speculation, often goes sadly limping. His criticism of Kant proves it. But a music maker in our written speech, Robert Louis Stevenson is the supreme mockingbird in English literature. He overplayed the sedulous imitator. John J. Chapman, in a brilliant essay, has traced the progress of this prose pilgrim, a professional stylist as well as a professional invalid. The American critic

Starting point is 03:46:04 registers the variations in style and sensibility of the Scotland, who did not always demonstrate in his writing the fundamental idea that the sole exponent of sensibility is analytic power. He drew freely on all his predecessors, and his personal charm exhibits the glue of unanimity, as old Wathius would say. Mr. Chapman quotes a passage supposedly from Sir Thomas Brown, beginning, Time sadly overcometh all things, which is not to be found in his collected writings. Yet it is apropos, because, like Stevenson's prose, it is from the crucible of an alchemist, though at the time Mr. Chapman quoted it was not known to be a clever Liverpoolian forgery. Since then, after considerable controversy, the paragraph in question

Starting point is 03:46:52 has been shown as the fabrication of a Liverpool man of letters, whose name we have forgotten. But it suggests, does this false brown, that good prose may be successfully simulated, though essentials be missing. If style cannot be imparted, what then is the next best thing to do, but then is the next best thing to do after a close study of the masters. We should say, go in a chastened mood to the nearest newspaper office and apply for a humble position on its staff.

Starting point is 03:47:21 Then one will come to grips with life, the pacemaker of style. There is a lot of pompous advice emitted by the college professor, the eternal sophomore, about fleeing journalists, whereas it is in the daily press, whether New York, Paris, Vienna, or London, that one may find the soundest,

Starting point is 03:47:39 most succinct prose, prose stripped of superfluous ornament, prose bare to the bone and infighting trim. But not elevated prose, numerous prose, as quintillion hath it. For the supreme harmony of English prose, we must go to the Bible, the authorized, not the revised, the latter manufactured by the People's Callery Visitors, as George St.Sbury Pletley describes them. To Shakespeare, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Brown, Walter Raleigh, Milton, to Quincy, Ruskin, Swanburn, Cardinal Newman, Peter, and Arthur Simmons, and not forgetting the sweet intimacy of Charles Lamb, the sly charm of Max Beerbaum, or the harmonious and imaginative prose of W.H. Hudson, whose green mansions recalls the Chateaubriot

Starting point is 03:48:30 of Atala, without its hateful note of morbid egotism. Nor are the exponents of the grand manner of an ornate style to be patterned after. If elevation of theme is not present, then the peril of fine writing is scarcely to be avoided. Better follow such writers as Bacon, Bunyan, Hobbs, Swift in preference. Or the Augustine group, Dryden, Addison, Shaftsbury, and Temple. But Dr. Johnson, Burke, and Given are not models for the beginner, any more than the Oraton prose of Bossot, the musical utterance of Chateaubriand, or the dramatic prose of Hugo, are safe models for French students.

Starting point is 03:49:09 the rich continents of Flaubert, the stibbled concision of Meramee, or the sherry-dry-dry wit of Voltaire are surer guides, and the urbane ease in flowing rhythms of Thackeray are preferable to the baphometric verbal baptisms of Carlisle the borness. Yet what sweet temptations are to be found in the golden age of English prose, beginning with the evocation of Sir Walter Raleigh. O eloquent, just and mighty death, Whom none could advise, thou hath persuaded. Surely not far beneath the magnificent prose of the sixtieth chapter of Isaiah in the authorized, Arise shine, for thy light is come,

Starting point is 03:49:50 and the glory of the Lord is risen unto thee. Which is so mighty in rhythm, that even those dolefulest of creatures, utterly ignorant of English literature, the revisers of 1870 to 85, hardly dared to touch at all, blandly remarks Professor St. S. And to balance the famous,

Starting point is 03:50:11 No, sense these dead bones, of Sir Thomas, there is a tender coda to Sir William Temple's use of poetry and music. When all is done, human life is at the greatest and best. These long, sweeping phrases, drumming with melody and cadences, like the humming of slow, uplifting walls of water tumbling on sullen strands, composed by the masters of that other harmony of prose,

Starting point is 03:50:40 are not mere purple panels, but music made by immortals. And I am convinced that if RLS were alive and condemned to read this last sentence of mine, with its monotonous run of M's, he would condemn it. Consider Milton and his majestic evocation.

Starting point is 03:51:00 Methink, Sondon, see in my mind a noble and placient nation arousing herself an eagle mewing her mighty youth and then fall down in worship for we are in the holy of holies stevenson preferred the passage i cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue and who shall gain saying him and steveson has written a most inspired study of the technical elements of style and literature to be found in the biographical edition In it, he calls the Macaulay An incomparable daubber For running the letter K through a paragraph And in it he sets forth in his chastened and classical style The ill-adusible

Starting point is 03:51:42 Henry James revived this pretty word Perils of Prose Also its fascinations The prose writer He says Must keep his phrases large Rhythmical Calmly

Starting point is 03:51:57 Without letting them fall into the strictly metrical harmonious in diversity, musical in the mouth, in texture woven into committed phrases and rounded periods. The stylist may vault airily into the saddle of logic, or in the delicate reticulation of his silver-fire paragraphs he may take, as an exemplar, John Henry Newman. Stevenson is a perfectionist, and that way lies madness for all save a few valiant spirits. Sir Walt Raleigh, formerly Professor Raleigh, has written a crystal clear study on style, an essay of moment, because in the writing thereof,

Starting point is 03:52:35 he preaches what he practices. He confesses that, inaneity dogs the footsteps of the classical tradition, and that, words must change to live, and a word once fixed becomes useless. This is the error of the classical creed to imagine that in a fleeting world

Starting point is 03:52:55 where the quickest eye can never see the same thing twice, and a deed once done, can never be repeated, language alone should be capable of fixity and finality, the flauberity and crux. Nevertheless, Flabbert could write of style in a fluid, impressionistic way, a style, which will be as rhythmic as verse, as precise as the language of science, which will have undulations, modulations like those of a violoncello, flashes of fire, a style which would enter into the idea like the stroke of a stiletto. All the combinations of prosody have been made.

Starting point is 03:53:36 Those of prose are still to make. Flabère was not obsessed by the unique word, but by a style which is merged in the idea, as the melodic and harmonic phrases of Richard Wagner were born simultaneously and closed in the appropriate orchestral colors. Perhaps the cadenced prose of Pater, with its multiple resonance and lingoous rhythms may be a sort of sublimated chess game,

Starting point is 03:54:03 as Saintsbury more than hints, yet what a fair field for his carved ivory pieces. His undulating and iridescent periods are like the solemn sound of organ music, accompanied from afar by a symphony of flutes, peacocks, and pomegranates. No wonder Stevenson pronounces French prose of finer art than English,

Starting point is 03:54:23 though admitting that in the richer, denser harmonious, of English, its native writers find at first-hand the very quality so eagerly sought for by Flaubert. French is a logical language, one of distinction and clarity, and one in which meter never intrudes, but it lacks the overtones of our mother's speech. The English share is in common with the Russian the art of awakening feelings and thoughts by the resonance of words, which seem to be written not in length but in depth, and then are lost in faint reverberations. but artistic prose chiselled prose is a negligible quantity nowadays it was all very well in the more spacious times of linkboys sedan chairs and bagwigs but with the typist cutting one's phrases into angular fragments with the soil at our heels saturated in slang what hope is there for assonance variety and rhythm and the sonorous cadences of prose right naturally we are told properly speaking there

Starting point is 03:55:26 is no such thing as a natural style. Even Newman, master of the pellucid, effortless phrase, confesses to laborious days of correction, and he wrote with the idea uppermost, and with no thought of style, so-called. Abraham Lincoln nourishes lonely soul on the Bible and bunion. He is a writer of simple yet elevated prose, without parallel in our native literature,

Starting point is 03:55:50 other than Emerson. Hawthorne and Poe wrote in the key of classic prose, while Walt Whitman's jigsaw jingle is the ultimate delinquence of prose form. For practical everyday needs, the 18th century prose men are the best to follow. But the Bible is the golden book of English prose. Quintilian wrote,

Starting point is 03:56:12 We cannot even speak except in longs and shorts. And longs and shorts are the material of feet. All personal prose should go to a tune of its own. The curious are recommended to the long. monumental work of George Sainsbury, a history of English prose rhythm. Prose may be anything else, but it must not be bad, blank verse. Numerous as to rhythms, but with no hint of balance in the metrical sense. Without rhythm, it is not prose at all. Professor Oliver Elton has set this forth with admirable lucidity

Starting point is 03:56:45 in his English prose numbers. He also analyzes a page from the Golden Bowl of Henry James, discovering new beauties of phrasing and subtle cadences in the prose of the prose of the this writer. Professor Sainsbury's study is the authoritative one among its fellows. Walter Pater's essay on style is honeycombed with involutions and perciosity. When on the art of writing, by author Quiller Couch appeared, we followed Heslett's advice and re-read an old book, English composition, by Professor Barrett Wendell, and with more pleasure and profit than followed the later perusal of the Cornish novelist's lectures. He warns against jargon.

Starting point is 03:57:23 But the seven arts, science, society, medicine, politics, religion, have each their jargon. Not music criticism, not baseball, are so painfully jargonized as metaphysics. Jargon is the fly in the oint of every critic. Even the worthy fellow of Jesus College, Sir Arthur himself does not altogether escape it. On page 23 of his inaugural address, he speaks of, Loose, Deskint, to talk. Diskin't is good, but ungirded is better, because it is not obsolete, and it is more sonorous than Saxon. On page 42, we stumble against Superdidiate, and gnash our teeth.

Starting point is 03:58:05 After finishing the book, the timid neophyte will be apt to lay the flattering unction to his soul that he is a born stylist, like the surprise Mr. Jordan, who spoke prose so many years without knowing it. 2 Fancy a tall imposing man In the middle years Standing before a music desk Humming and beating time His grey lion-like mane is in disorder

Starting point is 03:58:30 His large eyes Pools of blue light Gleam with excitement The color of his face is reddish The blood mounts easily to his head A prophetic sign of his death by apoplexy It is Gustav Lebe in his study of Crocein A few miles down the sand below Rouen

Starting point is 03:58:48 He is chanting a newly composed piece of prose, marking time as if he were conducting a music drama. What are you doing there? asked a friend. Scanning these words, because they don't sound well, he replied. Flaubert would spend a day over a sentence and practically tested it by declaiming, spouting, he called it, for as he wisely remarked, a well-constructed phrase adapts itself to the rhythm of respiration. His delight in prose, assidence, and cadence manifested itself in his predilection for such a phrase as Chateaubriolins in Natala. There's a man down the bois, The grand secret de melancholy,

Starting point is 03:59:28 Calamie a raconteur, ovi-chene, or excruvage antique, de l'emere. There's a mouth for you, as George St. Spurie would say. But in this age of uninflicted speech, the louder the click of the type machine, the better the style. If modern prose were written for the ear as well as the eye, chanted and scanned, it might prove more sonorous and rhythmic than it does, and more artistic.

Starting point is 03:59:56 Curiously enough, Professor Sainsbury in his magisterial work writes, I rather doubt myself whether the very finest and most elaborate prose is not better read than heard. That is, it must be overheard by the inner ear, which statement rather puts a damper on Floubert's contention. What saith the worthy Aristotle? All things are determined by number. Prose should have rhythm, but should not be metrical, rhetoric, which Robert Louis Stevenson thus paraphrase in his technical elements of style in literature,

Starting point is 04:00:32 a rule of Skenson in verse is to suggest no measure but the one in hand, in prose to suggest no measure at all. prose must be rhythmical and it may be as much so as you will but it must not be metrical it may be anything but it must not be a verse

Starting point is 04:00:51 probably if he had read the amorphous stuff by courtesy named verse Libra Stevenson would have written a stronger word than anything or again St. Spurray the rhythm of prose like the meter of verse

Starting point is 04:01:06 and in English as well as the classical languages be best expressed by the foot system, or system of mathematical combinations of long and short syllables. A fig for your ancient trumpery of skeleton scanning, cries Professor William Morrison Patterson in his The Rhythm of Prose. Amphabrox, Bocets, Antipast, Molassi, Docmiocs, and Prusilius Maddox, which heretofore have been brandished before our eyes, as if they were, were anything more than, as stress patterns, merely half the story. The Columbia University professor would be far more likely to endorse the axiom of Réme de Gaumont

Starting point is 04:01:51 that style is physiological, which Flabour well knew. And now, having deployed my heaviest artillery of quotation, let me begin by saying that Professor Patterson's study is a remarkable contribution to the critical literature of a much-debated theme, prose, rhythms. and this without minifying the admirable labors of Saintsbury, Shelley, Oliver Elton, Kerr, or Professor Buden of the New York University. One of the reasons that interest the present writer in the monograph is its strong musical bias. Professor Patterson is evidently the possessor of a highly organized musical ear, even if he be not a practical musician. He no doubt agrees with Israeli dictum that the key to literature is music, that is number, cadence, rhythm.

Starting point is 04:02:38 I recall Miss Dabney's study, the musical basis of verse, dealing as it does with a certain style of the subject. But the Patterson procedure is different. It is less literary than psychological, less psychological than physiological. He experiments with the Remé de Comont idea, though he probably never saw it in print. Rhythm, he writes in his preface, is thus regarded as first of all an experience, established as a rule, by motor performance of however rudimentary a nature. Here is the man of science at work. He speaks of the lost art of rhythm. Adduces syncopation so easily mastered by the born timers.

Starting point is 04:03:23 The Indians and Negroes pertinately remarks that no two individuals ever react exactly alike. The term type is in many ways a highly misleading fiction. Prose rhythm, he continues, must be classed as subjective organization of a regular, virtually haphazard arrangement of sounds. The ultimate basis of all rhythmic experience, however,

Starting point is 04:03:48 is the same. To be clear-cut, it must rest upon a series of definite temporal units. Professor Patterson experimented in two rooms. One, the regular sound room belonging to the Department of Psychology in Columbia, the other an expressly constructed, fairly sound, proof cabinet built into one end of an underground room belonging to the Department of Physics. It has a slightly sinister ring all this, has it not? Padded cells and oral fingerprints?

Starting point is 04:04:18 To make an Irish bull. Max Nordau called John Ruskin a tocomanda of aesthetics. Professor Patterson might be styled a tonal torturer, but the experimentings were painless. The first object, he informs us, was to find out as far as possible. how a group of 12 people, 10 men and two women, differed with respect to the complex of mental processes usually designated roughly as the sense of rhythm. After they had been ranked according to the nature of their reactions and achievements in various tests,

Starting point is 04:04:53 one of the group, who had evinced a measure of ease in rapid tapping, was chosen to make drumbeat records on a phonograph. A sentence from Walter Pader, a sentence from Henry James, a passage of music from Chopin, a haphazard arrangement of words and a haphazard arrangement of musical notes were tapped upon a small metal drum and the beats recorded by the phonograph.

Starting point is 04:05:16 The words were tapped according to the syllables as felt, a tap for each syllable. Ours, for example, was given two beats. The notes were tapped according to their designated time values. Observer number one, having had long training as a musician, found no technical difficulty in the task. The remaining 11 observers,

Starting point is 04:05:38 without being told the source of the records, heard the five series of drum beats and passed judgment upon them. The most significant judgment made was that of observer number seven, who declared that all five records gave him the impression of regular musical themes. A large number of the observers,

Starting point is 04:05:56 especially on the first hearing, found all of the records, including even the passage from Chopin, elusive and more or less irregular. An attempt was then made, by means of accompanying schedules, to find out how much or how little organization its observer could be brought to feel in the beats corresponding to the passage from Walter Pater and the passage of haphazard musical notes.

Starting point is 04:06:22 All the data are carefully set down in the appendices. The sentence by Walter Pader was chosen from his essay on Leonardo da Vinci in the Renaissance. It is the landscape, not of dreams or of fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousand with a miracle of finesse. S subtly rhythmic, too much so for any but trained ears. Some simpler excerpt from Sir Thomas Brown or John Ruskin might have been selected, such as, in the former case, the coda from the urn burial, or even that chest expanding phrase, to subsist in bones, and to be pyramidal the extant, is a fallacy in duration. Or, best of all, because of its tremendous intensity, the passage from St. Paul, for I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities,

Starting point is 04:07:17 nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord. The drumbeat is felt throughout, but the pulsation is not marked as in the pages of Macaulay, nor has it the monotony found in Longgren on account of the prevalence of common or four-for-time,

Starting point is 04:07:42 and also the coincidence of the metrical and rhythmical beat, a coincidence that Chopin usually avoids, and all later-day composers flee as dullness breeding. The bass rhythm of English prose is, so Professor Sainsbury writes, the peon or four-syllabled foot. And you could have added, provocative of ennui for delicate ears. Variety in rhythms is the ideal.

Starting point is 04:08:07 Our author appositely quotes from Puffer Studies in Symmetry, A picture, composed in substitutional symmetry, is more rich in its suggestions of motor impulse, and thus more beautiful than an example of geometrical symmetry. And this applies to prose and music as well as to pictures. It is the very kernel of the art of Paul Césan, Rhythmic irregularity, syncopation, asymmetry. To Quincy's Our Lady of Darkness,

Starting point is 04:08:38 and a sentence from Cardinal Newman's Grammar of Ascent, were included among the tests. Also one from Henry James, in the preface to the Golden Bowl, For I have nowhere found vindicated, the queer thesis that the right values of interesting prose depend all on withheld tests. If, according to lovers of the old rhetoric, of the resounding purple panels of Bocet, Chateaubriand, Flabbert, Raleigh, Brown, and Ruskin,

Starting point is 04:09:05 the cooler prose of Mr. James cannot be spouted. Nevertheless, the interior rhythmic life is finer and more complex. The Chopin Nocturne played was the familiar one in G minor, Opus 37, number one. Simple and rhythmic structure, though less interesting than its sister nocturne in G, Opus 37 number two. The first is in common, the second and six-eighth time. Professor Patterson knows Rhyman and his agogic accent, which, according to that editor of the Chopenetudes, is a slight expansion in the value of the note, not a dynamic accent.

Starting point is 04:09:41 In his treatment of Veres-Liber, our author is not too sympathetic. He thinks that, in their productions, free-verse poets, the disquieting experience of attempting to dance up the side of a mountain, is suggested.

Starting point is 04:09:58 For those who find this task exhilarating, Vers Libra, as a form, is without rival. With regard to subtle cadence, however, which has been claimed as a cheap distinction of the new poets, it is still a question as to how far they have surpassed the refinement of balance that quickens the prose of Walter Pater.

Starting point is 04:10:19 They have not, despite the verbal ingenuity, banished the impression of dislocation of the epileptic. In French, in the hands of Rimbaud, Verlaine, Verhalen, Verhalen, Gustav Khan, Regnard, Stuart Merrill, Belier-Gryphon, and Jules Laforge, the rhythms are supple. The alonance is grateful to the ear,

Starting point is 04:10:41 the irregular patterns not offensive to the eye. In a word, a form or a deviation from form, more happily adapted to the genius of the French or Italian language, than to the English. Most of our native, Berslibre sounds like a ton of coal falling through too small an aperture in the sidewalk. However,

Starting point is 04:11:01 it's not the gift that makes a god, but the worshipper. For musicians and writers, the interesting, if abstruse study of Professor Patterson will prove valuable. After reading of the results in his laboratory at Columbia, we feel that we have been, all of us,

Starting point is 04:11:18 talking rhythmic prose, our lifelong. End of Chapter 11. Recording by Talked. Chapter 12 of Unicorns, this is a Libravox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Unicorns by James Hunaker.

Starting point is 04:11:56 Chapter 12, The Queerist Yarn in the... the world. The way the story leaked out was this. A young Irishman from Sligo, as he blushingly admitted, whose face was a passport of honesty, stamped by nature herself, had served two customers over the bar of the old chop house across the street from the opera house. To him, they were just two throats a thirst. Nothing more. They ordered drinks, and this first attracted his attention, for they agreed on cognac.

Starting point is 04:12:39 Now brandy after dinner is not an unusual drink, but this pair had asked for a large glass. Old brandy was given them, and such huge swallows followed, that the bartender was compelled by his conscience, to ring up one dollar for the two drinks it was paid and another round commanded as if the two men were hurried as indeed they were for it was during an entreat at the opera that they had slipped out for liquid refreshments against the bar of the establishment a dozen or more humans were ranged and the noise was deafening but not so great as as to prevent the irishman from catching scraps of the conversation dropped by the brandy drinkers their talk went something like this and although michael had little schooling his memory was excellent

Starting point is 04:13:42 and being a decent chap there is no need to impeach the veracity of his report the taller man neither young neither old and like his friend without a grey hair burst out laughing after the disappearance of the second cognac i say old pal who was it wrote that brandy was for heroes kipling what the other man stockily built foreign-looking answered in a contemptuous tone sneering like as my informant put it where's your memory gone to wreck and ruin like your ideals i suppose kipling what do such youngsters know dr johnson of walter savage lander was the originator of the lying epigram after them byron gobbled it up as he gobbled up most of the good things of his generation and after him the deluge of this mediocre century when i told byron this at milan i think it was he vowed me an ass now it was dr johnson cheer up it's not a so bad i remember once at paris or was it vienna you said the same thing about and here followed a strange name and anyhow you were mixing dates lander followed byron please but i suppose he said it first i told metternick of your bomo and de get he laughed did that old parchment face as for bonaparte upstart and charlotte He was too selfish to smile at anybody's wit but his own, and little he had.

Starting point is 04:15:37 Do you remember the Congress of Vienna? Do I? 1815? Some such year, or was it in 1750, when we saw Casanova at Venice? Well, at this point the alarm signal went off, and the mob went over to the opera. The young bartender's heart was beating so fast that it leaped up in his bosom, as he described it. Two middle-aged men, talking of a century ago as calmly as if they had spoken of yesterday, flustered him a bit. He heard the dates. He noticed the perfectly natural manner in which events were mentioned.

Starting point is 04:16:22 There was no mystification. For the first time in his life, Michael was sorry. The between-act pause was so short, and he longed for the next one, though fatigued from the labors of the last. With these gentlemen return for more cognac, in an hour they came back with the crowd, again drank old five-star brandy, and gossiped about a lot of incomprehensible things that had evidently taken place in the 16th or 17th century. At least Michael overheard them disputing dates, and one of them bet the other that the big fire in London occurred in 1666, and referred the question to Mr. Pepper's or Papp's some such name. Ah, poor old peeps, sighed the dark man. If he had only taken better care of himself, he might have been with us today, instead of mouldering in his grave. oh well you can't expect everyone to believe in your strewd-brug cure replied his friend dreamily even her majesty queen anne would not take your advice though mrs masham and mr harley begged her to yes about the only thing they ever agreed upon in their life where is harley to-day oh i suppose in london carelessly replied the other for a young bird of several centuries

Starting point is 04:17:52 He's looking as fit as a fiddle, but see here, swift, old boy. Your bogey tales are worrying our young friend, and with that Michael says they pointed to him, heartily laughed, and went away. He crossed himself, and for a moment, the electric lights burned dim, so it seemed to the superstitious laddie buck, but he had a good chance to study the odd pair. They were not, as he repeated, old, men, neither were the youthful, say 35 or 40 years, and he noticed this time the freshness of their complexions, the brilliancy of their eyes. They were just gentlemen in evening clothes and had run across Broadway without overcoats, a reprehensible act even for a young man, but they

Starting point is 04:18:46 were healthy, self-contained, and hard-headed. They took, according to this statistician, beyond the bar, about a quarter brandy between them, and were as fresh as daisies after the fiery stuff. Who were they? Blaggers, said I, after I had carefully, deciphered the runic inscription in Michael's mind. This was a week later. Two fellows out on a lark, bent on scaring a poor Irish boy.

Starting point is 04:19:16 But what was Swift, or Queen Anne, or Metternick, or Mr. Harley to him, just words. Bone apart, he might be expected to remember. It was curious all the same that he could reel off the unusual names of Mrs. Masham and Casanova. The deuce?

Starting point is 04:19:36 Was there something in the horrid tale? Two immortals stalking the globe when their very bones should have been dissolved into everlasting dust. Two wraiths revisiting the glimpses of the moon. Hold on. Strullbrug. Who was Strolled Brug?

Starting point is 04:19:56 What his cure? I tried to summon from the vasty deep all the worthies of the 18th century. Stralled Brug, swift. Strawled Brug, Sir William Temple. Stroll Brug, ah, by the great horn spoon. The strawbrugs of the island of Laputa,

Starting point is 04:20:17 Gulliver's hideous immortals, and then the horror of the story, enveloped me. But despite my version to meeting the dead, I determined to live in the chop-house till I saw face to face these ghosts from a vanished past. My curiosity was soon gratified, as the sequel will show. Just one week after the appearance of this pair, I stood talking to the Irish barman when I saw him start and pale. Ha! I thought, here are my men. I was not mistaken. I was not mistaken, too well-built and well-groomed gentlemen, asked for brandy, and swallowed it in silence. They were polite enough to avoid my rather rude stare. No wonder I stared. They recalled familiar faces,

Starting point is 04:21:07 yet I couldn't at once place the owners. Presently they went over to a table and seated themselves, loudly calling for a mug of musty ale, I boldly put myself at an adjacent spot and continued my spying tactics. The friends were soon in hot dispute. It concerned the literary reputation of Balzac. I sat with my mouth wide open. The elder of the pair, the one called Swift, snapped at his friend. Zounds, sir. You and your Balzac, hogwash and roosters in rut.

Starting point is 04:21:43 that's about his capacity of course when you owned dull stuff appeared he praised you for the sake of the paradox you moderns thouzac the father of french fiction you the father or is it grandfather of psychology a nice crew that boy mopassant had more stuff in him than a wilderness of zolaz goncourt and the rest he is almost as amusing as pole de cauccoq The other, the little man, bristled with rage. Because you wrote a popular boy's book, full of filth and pessimism, you think you know all literature, and didn't you copy Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyager, and Defoe,

Starting point is 04:22:32 you satirize everyone except God, whom you spare because you don't know him. I don't care much for Balzac, though I'm free to confess he did treat me handsomely and praising my chateurs. Good God, I groaned. It's stand all.

Starting point is 04:22:50 Otherwise, Henry Bale, laying down the law to the tremendous author of Gulliver's travels, and yet neither man looked the accepted portrait of himself. Above all, no straw-brug, moles were in view. I forgot my former fear, being interested in the dispute of these two giant writers, who were more akin artistically

Starting point is 04:23:11 than ever taken cognizant, of by criticism. Dead? What did I care? They were surely alive now, and I was not dreaming. I didn't need to bench myself or my eyes and ears reported the occurrence. A miracle. Why not? Miracles are daily if we but knew it. Living is the most wonderful of all miracles. The discussion proceeded. Swift spoke tersely, just as he wrote.

Starting point is 04:23:39 Enough, friend Bale, you are a charlatan. Your knowledge of the human heart is on a par with your taste and literature. You abominate Flaubert because his prose is more rhythmic than yours? I bow, I protest, interrupted Stendall. No matter, I'm right. Merrimé, your pupil is your master at every point. I could no longer contain myself, and bursting with curiosity. I cried, pardon me, dear masters, for interrupting such a luminous altercation,

Starting point is 04:24:13 notwithstanding the queerness of the situation, may I not say that I meet in the flesh, Jonathan Swift, and Henri Bale Stendal. Discovered by the eternal Jehovah, roared Swift, adding an obscene phrase which I discreetly omit, Stendall took the incident coolly. As I am rediscovered about every decade

Starting point is 04:24:39 by ambitious young critics, anxious to achieve reputations, I'm not disturbed by our young friend here. Your apology, monsieur, is accepted. Pray, join us in a fresh drink and conversation. But I was only thirsty for more talk. Oceans of talk. I eagerly asked Stendell, who regarded me with cynical eyes,

Starting point is 04:25:01 all the while fingering his little whistre, Did you ever hear Chopin play? Who, he solemnly asked in turn, is Chopin? He was at his best in the first in the first. forties and as you didn't die till pardon me monsieur i never died your chopin may have died but i am immortal you venerable strode brug giggle swift i was disagreeably impressed yet held my ground you must have met him he was a friend of balsac his music was then in vogue at paris i stumbled in my speech he probably means that little polish piano player who dangled at the petticoats of Jean-San, interpolated swift. I knew Grima Rosa, Rossini, I saw, but I never heard of Chopin. As for the Saum woman, that cow who chewed and re-chute her literary cud,

Starting point is 04:26:01 don't mention her name to me, please. She is the village pump of fiction. Water, wet water. Vazac was bad enough. My heart sank, Chopin, not even remembered. by a contemporary. This then is fame, but the immortality of Stendal of Swift would of that? Its reality was patent to me. Perhaps Balzac, Saint-Frobert, were still alive. I propounded the question. Swift answered it. Yes, they are alive. My stroll brugs are meant to symbolize the immortality

Starting point is 04:26:35 of genius. Only stupid people die. Saint is a barmaid in London. Boussac is on the road selling knit goods, and a mighty good drummer, he is sure to be, but poor Flaubert has had hard luck. He was the reader to a publishing house and forced to pass judgment on the novels of the day. Favorable judgment, mind you, on the popular stuff. He nearly burst a blood vessel when they gave him a Marie-Corelli manuscript to correct. To correct the style, mind you, he, Flaubert, the gods are certainly capricious. Now the old chap, he has aged since 1880, is in New York reading proof at a daily newspaper office. He sits at the same desk with Ben de Casere.

Starting point is 04:27:23 And every time he mutters over the rhythm of a sentence, Ben wraps him on the knuckles and says, You are an old-fashioned bourgeois, pop flow bear. Some night I'll take you over to Jackson, recite my sermon on suicide to teach you what brilliance and bovaryism really means. I was shocked at this blasphemy and said so. Standaw calmly bade me to keep my temper. But isn't Mr. Swift joking? Mr. Swift is always joking, was the far-from-reassuring reply. Do feel in the interval I call for the waiter.

Starting point is 04:27:57 The ghost again demanded Cognac. Stand-Doll looked like the caricature by Felicillicent. Rolps, in which his little pop-belly figure, broad face, snub-nosed, and protuberant, eyes. are shown dominating some strange comsmaupolis of nineteen thirty two in life or death he seemed supremely self-satisfied he glowered at the name of flaubert rejoicing in the sad existence of a mighty prose master but he smiled superciliously when i approached him with not knowing chopin hina's poetic fantasy of the gods of greece alive and still in hiding was not precisely convincing in the present reincarnation A feeling of repulsion ensued, and finally I rose and said good-night to my very new and very old friends. Swift's picture of the Strelbrooks was realized, and it was an unpleasant one.

Starting point is 04:28:53 Men of genius should never be seen. In their works alone they live. Swift, with his nasty, sly, constipated humor, Stendall, with his overwhelming air of arrogance and superiority, did not win my sympathy. They evidently noted my dismay. You're disappointed, so sorry, said Swift ironically. At first I was vastly intrigued of the opportunity of talking with one of you, modern persons, but I see I'm mistaken.

Starting point is 04:29:22 Ah, Bale, what do you say? Stendell pondered, Simorosa, Rossini, and Haydn, I knew. Correggio, I admire. But who was Chopin? Stung to anger, I retorted, Yours is the loss, not Chopin's. whereat Michael, the bartender, merely laughed, and the company joined him. I was the sacrificial goat.

Starting point is 04:29:46 My head was on the chopping block, and Stendall was the executioner. Forgetting the respect due to such illustrious shades, I shook my finger under Stendall's upturned nostrils. You may be a couple of impostors for all I know, but even if you are not, I wish to tell you how heartily I dislike your petty-carping criticisms. better oblivion than immortality for your lean and sinister souls again hysterical laughter as i left i overheard swift say in reproachful accents as if his vanity had been wounded this saucy yahoo reads our books and believes in them but when we talk he doubts us as sam johnson used to say the reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the forest of life stendall boomed out he is dead himself but doesn't know it yet all critics are still born but we live on forever garson some more brandy out on crowded expressive broadway i stood

Starting point is 04:30:51 dazed and irritated. After all, the plover of authors, it is the critic who has the last word, like a woman. Rejoicing over the originality of the idea, I went my wooden way. End of Chapter 12. Chapter 13 of Unicorns. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. recording by Olivia Unicorns by James Hunaker Chapter 13 on rereading Malick

Starting point is 04:31:34 It seems the dark, backward, and abysm of time when writing the name of William Hirel Malick Yet not 40 years ago He was the most discussed author of his day. The old conundrum is life worth living he revived and newly orchestrated with particular reference to the spiritual needs of the hour and a romance of the 19th century was denounced as immoral as Mademoiselle de Montpain.

Starting point is 04:32:01 Gautier was read then, and Swinburne's lelting paganism quite filled the lyric sky. Mr. Malick's role was that of a philosophical novelist and essayist who reproved the golden materialism of his age, not with fulogynous menace, as did Carlyle, nor with melodious indignation, like Ruskin, but with a more subtle instrument of castigation. irony. He laughed at the gods of the new scientific dispensation, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, and he put them in the pages of his New Republic for the delictation of the world, and most appealing foolery it was, this and the sheer burlesque of the New Paul and Virginia. Mr. Malick was an individualist. The influence of John Stuart Mill had not yet waned in the

Starting point is 04:32:50 70s, he occupied then a place midway between Bentham and Spencer. His birth, breeding, and temperament made Malac a foe to socialism, to the promiscuous in politics, religion, society, therefore an apostle of culture, not missing its precious side, witnessed Mr. Rose in the New Republic, and one who abhorred the crass and the irreverent in the new learning. He enjoyed Vogue. His ideas were boldly seized and transformed by the men of the 90s, yet today it's difficult to get a book of his. They are mostly out of print, which is equivalent to saying, out of mind. With what personal charm he invested his romances. He is the literary progenitor of a long line of young men, artistic and taste,

Starting point is 04:33:34 a trifle skeptical as to final causes, wealthy, worldly, widely cultured, and aristocratic. The staler art of Oscar Wilde gives the individual of Malac, petrified, into a rather unpleasant type. Walter Pater's fear that the word hedonist would be suspected as immoral came true in Wilde's books. The heroes of a romance of the 19th century, Tristam Lacey, and the New Republic, have a strong family resemblance. They were supermen before Nietzsche was discovered. They are prepossessed by theological problems, they love the seven arts, and are trifle decadent. Though when action is demanded, they do not fail to respond. As stories go, a romance, a romance is the best of Malick's. The canvas of Tristam Lacey is larger, the intrigue less intense,

Starting point is 04:34:23 and the characterization more human. The unhappy girl, Cynthia Walters, who so shocked our mothers, is not duplicated in Tristam. Mr. Malick wrote a preface to the second edition of a romance, a superfluous one for the book needs no apology. It never did. It is as moral as Madame Bovary, though not as pleasant. The triangle is a revered convention, in French fiction, but the naturalistic photographs in a romance are not agreeable, and Cynthia's epitaph, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God, leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. It is in the mode ironical, almost projected to the key of cynicism. No doubt, the leisurely gate of these fictions would be old-fashioned to the present generation, with its preference for staccato

Starting point is 04:35:10 English, morbid sensationalism, and lack of grace and scholarship. Mr. Malick is a scholar, and a gentleman who writes a prose of distinction, and he is also a thinker, reactionary to be sure, but a tilter at sham philosophies and sham religions. Last but not least, he has abundant humor and a most engaging wit. Possibly all these qualities would make him unpopular in our present century. What a gathering of choice spirits in the New Republic, Matthew Arnold, Professor Jowett, a fine character etching, Huxley, Tindall, Carlisle, Carlyle, Paisal, Hater, rather cruelly treated, Ruskin, Dr. Pusey, Mrs. Mark Patterson, W. K. Clifford, Violet Fane. How the author juggles with their personalities, with their ideas. It's the cleverest

Starting point is 04:36:00 parody of its kind. Otto Lawrence and Robert Leslie are closely related in aspirations to Ralph Vernon, Ali Campbell, and the priest Stanley of a romance. As portraits, those of the premier Lord Roncorn in Tristram Lacey and the faded dandy poet and man about town, Lord Serbiton, of a romance, are difficult to match outside of Disraeli. Epigrams drop like snowflakes. The decor is always gorgeous. Montecarlo, Provence, Captawan, countries flowing with milk and honey, marble ruins, the Ilics, Cyprus, and Palm. Palaces there are, and inhabited by languid, fascinating young man who anxiously examine in the glass their expressive countenances, asking the Lord whether he is pleased with them.

Starting point is 04:36:46 lovely girls, charming, and, in Cynthia Walters' case, a lily with a cankered calyx. Then there are the Price-Bausfields and the inimitable Mrs. Norham, celebrated authoress and upholder of the people. One of the notable blackards and fiction is Colonel Stapleton and the Poodle and the new rich Helbeckstines. A complete picture gallery may be found in these interesting novels. Romance rules, poetry, tenderness, and the appreciation of the eternal feminine, and a pity for living for. things. Poor Cynthia Walters, the dear dead woman lingers in the memory, as modern as yesterday, and as he faced as a daguerre type. But if his heroes sow their oats tamely, Mr. Malick, as an antagonist, is most vigorous. He went at the scientific men with all the weapons in his

Starting point is 04:37:34 armory. Today there no longer exists the need of such polemics. In the moral world, there are analogies to the physical, and particularly in geology, with its prehistoric stratifications, its vast herbarium, its quarries and petrifications, its osuaries, the bones of vanished forms, ranging from the shadow of a leaf to the flying crocodile, the horridoradactyl, now reduced to the exquisite and iridescent dragonfly, from the monstrous mammoth to the tiny forerunner of the horse. Philosophy and religion too have their mighty dead, their immemorial tombs wherein repose the bones of the buried dead skeletons of obsolete systems,

Starting point is 04:38:12 and on the sands of time lie the arc images of antique thought awaiting the condine catastrophe. There are Kant and his followers, and near the idealists are the materialists. Next to Hegel is Buchner, and at the base of the vast structure so patiently reared by Herbert Spencer, the mists are already dense, though not as obscuring as the clouds about the mausoleum of Comte. That great charmless woman, George Eliot, smiles a smile of somber Unwee before the Spencer tomb, and the invisible voice of Ernest Hekel is heard whispering, Where is your positivism? Where is your rationalism? What has become of your gaseous invertebrate God? Surely there is sadly required in the cynical universities of the world, a chair of irony

Starting point is 04:38:59 with the subtle Edgar Saltus as its first incumbent. Now Mr. Malak knows that religion and philosophy may travel on parallel lines, therefore never collide. He took the catchword, the bankruptcy of science, too seriously. Notwithstanding the persuasive rhetoric of that silken sophist Henry Bergson, a belated visionary metaphysician in a world of realities, the trend of latter-day thought is toward the veritable victories of science. A new world has come into being. And what discoveries? Spectral analysis, the modes of force, matter displaced by energy, the relations of atoms and molecules, a renewed geology, astronomy, paleontology, biology, embryology, wireless telegraphy, the conquest of air, and last, but not least, the discovery of radium.

Starting point is 04:39:48 The slightly war-torn evolution theory is now confronted by the transformism of Hugo de Vries, who has shown in the most original manner that nature also proceeds by sudden leaps as well as slow, orderly progress. And the brain, that telephonic center, according to Bergson, is become another organ. Ramani Kahal, the Spanish biologist, with his neurons, little erectile bodies in the cells of the cortex stirred to motor impulses when a message is sent them from the sensory nerves, has done more for positive knowledge than a wilderness of metaphysicians. That famous interrogation, is life worth living, may be viewed today from a different angle. Mr. Malak acknowledged that the question must be answered in the terms of the individual only.

Starting point is 04:40:32 Here we encounter a new crooks. What is the individual? The family is the unit of society, not the individual, and the autonomous eye. exists no longer, except as a unit in the colony of cells which are we. Man is a being afloat in an ocean of vibrations. Society demands the cooperation of its component cells, else relegates to solitude the individual who cannot adapt himself to play a humble part in the Cosmical Orchestra.

Starting point is 04:41:00 That protein theory, socialism, has changed his chameleonic hues many times since Mr. Malick wrote, Is Life Worth Living? His idea is worked out with great clearness in the apprehension of detail, but with little feeling for their relations to each other. Sadly considered, we may take it for granted that life has a definite aim. We live, as a modern thinker puts it, because we stand like the rest of cognizable nature under the universal law of causality.

Starting point is 04:41:26 This idea is founded, not on a metaphysical, but a biological basis. Metaphysics is a pleasing diversion, though it doesn't get us to finalities. Happiness is an absolute. Therefore, it has no existence. There never was, there never was. never will be an earthly paradise, no matter what the socialists say. Content is the sumum bonum of mankind. The content that comes with sound health and a clear

Starting point is 04:41:51 conscience. The wrangling over free will is now considered a sign of ghost worship. Schopenhauer and his mystic will to live are both rather amusing survivals of antique animism. The problem is not whether we can do what we want to do, but whether we can will what we want to will. But the illusion of individual freedom of will is the last illusion to be dissipated in this most deterministic of worlds and most pluralistic of universes. It's a poor conception of eternity that doesn't work both ways. As there will be no end to things, there never was a beginning. Eternity is now. Professor Hugh S. R. Eliot wrote in his brilliant refutation of Bergson that, the feeling we have of a necessity for such an explanation, the attempt to explain

Starting point is 04:42:36 the universe, arises from the conformation of our brains, which think by associating disjointed ideas, no last explanation is possible or perhaps even exists, end quote, which will please the relativists and pain the absolutists, but deprive mankind of its dreams, and it is like the naughty child in hands Christian Anderson's fable, a fairy punished this child by giving him dreamless slumber, without vision, old as well as young, limp through life. pessimism as a philosophy, it has been pointed out, is the last superstition of primordial times. It is a form of egotomania. From Byron to D'Nunzio, pessimism-filled poetry. From Werther to Zennine, it has ruled fiction. It is less a philosophy than a matter of temperament. It was the mode

Starting point is 04:43:23 during the last century, and as an issue is as dead as the humanitarianism that followed. Is life worth living? Was properly, if somewhat cynically answered. It depends on the liver. Pessimism is the pathetic fallacy reduced to medicinal formula. It is now merely in our stock of mental attitudes, usually oppose. When it's not, it's bound to be pathological. Yet, Boisewe has spoken of the inexorable endures which forms the basis of life. Mr. Malick was once accused of dilettantism, aesthetic and ethical. Nevertheless, there is no mistaking his moral earnestness at the close of is life worth living. Furthermore, he foresaw the muddle the world making today in the conduct of life. All the self-complacent chatter about self-annihilation

Starting point is 04:44:11 during the Buddhist upheaval some decades ago has been translated into a veritable annihilation. The holy name of altruism, social emotion made functional, has vanished into the intense inane. The higher forms of discontent have modulated into the debasing superstition of universal slaughter. With Bergson, the divinity of diving into the subconscious, what else is his intuition? is set before the lovers of the mystic to worship. Years ago, the Sufi doctrine declared that the judging faculty should be abandoned for the intuitive. Don't reason. Just dream. The poet Rogers replied to a lady who asked his religion that his was the religion of all sensible men.

Starting point is 04:44:52 And what is that? she persisted. That no sensible men ever tell. But Mr. Malak has told, and four decades after his confession, he is still worth rereading. End of Chapter 13. Recording by Olivia. Chapter 14 of Unicorns. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Alivia. Unicorns by James Hunaker. Chapter 14, The Lost Master. What's become of wearing since he gave us all the slip was, quote,

Starting point is 04:45:39 by a man at the painter's club the other night. What made him think of Browning, he blandly explained to the two or three chaps sitting at his table on the terrace, was not the terrific heat, but the line swam across his memory when he recalled the name of Albertus Magnus. As the green meteor seen for a moment far out at sea, drops into the watery void. Who in the name of Apollo is Albertus Magnus? was asked. The painter sat up. There you are, you fellows, he roared.

Starting point is 04:46:09 You all paint or write or spoil marble, but for the history of your art, you don't care a wrap. Yes, but what is your Albertus thing of a jig to do with Browning's wearing? Only this, was the grumbling reply. It is a similar case. A story, a story, we all cried and settled down for yarn. But no yarn was spun. The painter relapsed into silence, and the group gradually dissolved. We sat still, hoping against hope. See here, we expost. really you should not arouse expectations and then evade the logical conclusions it's not fair i didn't care to explain it to those other fellows was the reply they are too cynical for my taste they go to the holy of holies of art to pray and come away to scoff materialism rather than realism as you call it is the canker of modern art suppose i told you that here now in this noisy toffet of new york there lives a man of genius

Starting point is 04:47:09 who paints like a belated painter of the Renaissance. Suppose I said I could show you his work. Would you think I was crazy? He paused. A young genius, poor, unknown. Oh, lead us to him, sir painter, and we shall call you blessed. He's not young, and while the great public and the little dealers have not heard of him, he has a band of admirers. Rich men leagued in a conspiracy of silence who buy his pictures, though they don't show them to the critics. We reiterated our request. Lead us to him. Without noticing our importunities, he continued.

Starting point is 04:47:46 He paints for the sake of beautiful paint. He paints as did Hokusai, the old man mad for painting. Or like Frenhofer, the hero in Balzac's story, the unknown masterpiece. He's more like Balzac's Franhofer. Is that the chap's name? Than Browning's wearing. He is the lost master of Frenhofer who has conquered, for he has a hundred masterpiece.

Starting point is 04:48:09 stored away in his studio. A lost master, we stuttered. A hundred masterpieces that have never been shown to critic or public? Oh, never Star was lost here, but it rose afar. Yes, and he quotes Browning by the yard, for he was the close friend of the poet, and of his best critic, Nettleship, the animal painter, now dead.

Starting point is 04:48:32 Won't you tell his story connectedly and put us all out of our agony, we pleaded? No, he answered. I'll do better. I'll take you to his studio. The evening ended in a blaze of fireworks. The afternoon following, we found ourselves in Greenwich Village, in front of a row of old-fashioned cottages covered with honeysuckle. You may recall the avenue on this particular block that has thus far resisted the temptation to become either lofty apartment or business palace. But the painter met us here and conducted us westward until we reached a warehouse. Gloomy, in need of

Starting point is 04:49:09 pair, yet solid, despite the teeth of time. We entered the wagonway, traversed a dirty court, mounted a dark staircase, and paused before a low door. Do you knock, we were admonished, and it once did so, approaching footsteps. A rattling and grating of rusty bolts and keys. The door was slowly opened. A big hairy head appeared. The eyes set in this halo of white hair were positively the most magnificent I've ever seen sparkle and glow in a human countenance. If a lion were capable of being at once poet and prophet and exalted animal, his eyes would have possessed something of the glance of this stranger. We turned anxiously to our friend. He had disappeared. What a trick to play at such a moment.

Starting point is 04:49:58 Who do you wish? Rumbled a meller voice. Albertus Magnus? We timidly inquired, expecting to be pitched down the stairs the next minute. it. Ah, was the reply. Silence. Then, come in, please, don't stumble over the canvases. We followed the old man, whose stature was not as heroic as his head, and we did not fail to stumble, for the way was obscure and paved with empty frames, canvases, and a litter of bottles, paint tubes, easels, rugs, wretched furniture, and all the other flotsam and jetsam of an old-style studio. We were not sorry when we came into open space and light. We were in the room that doubtless

Starting point is 04:50:39 concealed the lost masterpieces, and there, blithely smoking a cigarette, sat our guide, the painter. He had entered by another door, he explained, and without noticing our discontented air, he introduced us to the man of the house. In sheer daylight he looked younger, though his years must have bordered upon the biblical three score and ten. But to soul, the brain that came out of his wonderful eyes, were as young as tomorrow. Isn't he a corker? Irreverently demanded our friend. He's not even as old as he looks. He doesn't eat vegetables. When thirsty, he drinks anything he can get, and smokes day and night. And yet he calls himself an idealist. The old painter smiled. I suppose I have been described as wearing to you, because I knew Robert Browning. I did

Starting point is 04:51:26 vanish from the sight of my friends for years, but only in the attempt to conquer paint, not to achieve money or kingship, like the original Alfred Domet, called Waring in the poem. But when I returned from Italy, I was a stranger in a strange land. No one remembered me. I had last seen Elihu Vedder at Capri. Worst of all, I had forgotten that with time, fashions change in art, as in dress. And nowadays, no one understands me. And with the exception of Arthur Davies, I understand no one. I come from the Venetians, Davies from the early Florentines. His line is as beautiful as Polonjulo. I love gold more than did Facino Cane of Balzac.

Starting point is 04:52:10 Gold, ah, luscious gold, the lost secret of the masters. Tell me, do you love Titian? We swore allegiance to the memory of Titian. The artists seem pleased. You younger men are devoted to Velazquez and Halse, too much so. Greatest painters, possibly greatest among painters, their souls never broke away from the soil like runaway below. balloons. They miss height and depth. Their color never sings like Titians. They surprise secrets in the

Starting point is 04:52:39 eyes of their sitters, but never the secrets surprised by the Italian. I sat at his feet, before his canvases, 50 years, and I'm farther away than ever. Our friend interrupted this rhapsody. Look here, Albertus, you man with a name out of Thomas Aquinas, don't you think you're playing on your visitor's nerves just to set them on edge with expectancy? I've heard this choral service for the glorification of Titian more than once, and I've inevitably noticed that you had a trump up your own sleeve. You love Titian. Well, admit it.

Starting point is 04:53:12 You don't paint like him. Your color scheme is something else, and what you are after, you only know yourself. Come, trot out your phantom ship, or the cascade of gold, or, or better still, that landscape with a riverbank and shepherds. The old man gravely bowed. Then he manipulated the light,

Starting point is 04:53:30 placed a big easel in proper position. fumbled among the canvases that made the room smaller, secured one and placed it before us. We drew a long breath. Vucard Wagner, not Captain Marriott, was the inspiration, murmured the master. The tormented vessel stormed down the picture, every inch of sail bellying out in the wind

Starting point is 04:53:52 that blew a gale infernal beneath the rays, so it seemed us, of a poisonous golden moon. The water was massive and rhythmic. In the first plane a smaller, ship does not even attempt to tack. You anticipate the speedy crackling and smashing when the flying Dutchman rides over her, but it never happens. Like the moonshine, the phantom ship may melt into air bubbles before it reaches the other boat. No figures are shown. Nevertheless, as we studied the picture, we fancied that we discerned the restless soul of Vanderdrecken, pacing his quarterdeck,

Starting point is 04:54:26 cursing the elements, or longing for some far away Senta. A poetic composition handled with master's evasiveness. The color was the strangest part of it. Where had Albertus caught the secret of that flowing gold, potable gold, gold that threateningly blazed in the storm rack? Gold as lyric as sunshine in the spring? And why such sinister gold in a moonlit sea? We suspected illusion. My friend the painter laughed. Aha! You are looking for the sun. And is it only a moon overhead? Our conjurer here has a few tricks. No, then, credulous one, that the moon yonder is really the sun. Seek the reason for that suffused back sky, realized that the solar photosphere in a mist is precisely the breeder of all this magic gold you so envy. Yes, we exclaimed, but the motion of it all, the grip, only Turner,

Starting point is 04:55:21 we were interrupted by a friendly slap on the back. Now you are talking since, said our friend. Turner, a new Turner, who has heard the music of Wagner and read the magic prose of Joseph Conrad. What followed, we shall not pretend to describe. Landscapes of old ivory and pearly grays, portraits in which varnish modulated with colors of a gamut of intensity that set tingling the eyeballs and played a series of tonal variations in the thick of which theme was lost, hinted at, emerged triumphantly, and at the end vanished in the glorious. arabesque, then followed apocalyptic visions, in which the solid earth staggered through the Empirian after a black sun, a magnetic disc doomed by a mighty voice that cried aloud,

Starting point is 04:56:08 It is accomplished. Pastoral's as ravishing as Georgonis, with nuances of gold undreamed of since the yellow flecks in the robes of Rembrandt faced us. Our very souls centered in our eyes, but on critical as was our mood, in the presence of all this imaginative art, we could not help noticing that it was without a single trait of the modern. Both in theme and treatment, these pictures might have been painted at the time of the Renaissance. The varnish was as wonderful as that on the belly of a Stradivarius fiddle. The blues were of a celestial quality to be found in a Titian or Vermeer. The resonant browns, the whites, such exquisite whites.

Starting point is 04:56:52 Plue Blanche can blue blanche, Ehrmann, the rich blacks, sonorious reds and yellows, what were all these but secrets recovered from the old masters? The subjects were mainly legendary or mythological. No discordant note of modernity

Starting point is 04:57:08 obtruded its ugly self. We were in the presence of something as rare as a lyric by Shelley or the playing of Frederick Chopin. What? Why? How? We felt like asking all at once but Albertus Magnus only smiled, and we choked our emotion. Why had he never exhibited at the academy or a special show?

Starting point is 04:57:30 Our friends saw our embarrassment and shielded us by blurting out, No, he never exhibited this obstinate, Albertus. He never will. He makes more money than he needs, and we'll leave it to some cat asylum, for he is a hardened bachelor. Women do not interest him. You won't find one female head in all this amazing collection, nor has the dear old Diogenes suffered from a love affair. His only love is his paint. His one weakness is a selfish, a miserly desire to keep all this beautiful paint for himself.

Starting point is 04:58:03 Balzac would have delighted to analyze such a peculiar mania. Degas is amiability itself compared with this curmudgeon of genius. Now don't stop me, Albertus. But I must, expostulated the painter. I'm always glad to receive visitors here, if they are not dealers or a person's ignorant of art or those who think the moderns can paint. Yet no one comes to see me. My chattering friend here occasionally asks them, and he's a hoaxer, while I go nowhere. I haven't been east of 9th Avenue for years. What shall I do? Paint, was the curt answer of our friend as we took our leave. In New York, now, a painter of genius who is known to few. Extraordinary. Is his name really Albert. Magnus? Or is that only Latin for Albert Rider? Our friend shrugged his shoulders and smiled mysteriously.

Starting point is 04:58:58 We hate tomfoolery. Be frank, we adjourned him. He hummed. In Vishnu Landwat Avatar, more browning, we sneered. Then we crossed over to the club and talked art far into the night. Also wet our clay. And Albertus Magnus? Will he never come from his paint cave and reveal to the world his masterpieces? Perhaps. Who knows? As the Russians say, Avos! End of Chapter 14. Read by Alivia. Chapter 15 of Unicorns. This is a Librevox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Unicorns by James Hunica, the Grand Manner in Piano Here lies one whose name is writ on ivory might be the epigraph of every great pianist's life,

Starting point is 05:00:04 and the ivory is about as perjurable stuff as the water in which is written the epitaph of John Keats. Despite cunning reproductive contrivances, the executive musician has no more chances of lasting fame than the actor. The career of both is brief but brilliant. Glory then is largely a question of memory, and when the contemporaries of atonal artists pass away, then he has no existence except in the biographical dictionaries. Creative, not interpretive, art endures. Better be immortal while you are alive, which wish may account for the number of young men who write their memoirs

Starting point is 05:00:44 while their cheeks are still virginal of beards, while the pianist or violinist plays his autobiography, and this may be some compensation for the eternal injustice manifested in matters mundane. Whosoever heard the lion-like velvet paws of Anton Rubinstein, caressed the keyboard, shall never forget the music. He is the greatest pianist in my long and varied list. Think of his delivery of the theme at the opening of Beethoven's G major concerto, or in that last page of Chopin's Barcarol.

Starting point is 05:01:18 It was no longer the piano tone, but the sound of distant waters and horns from Elfland, a mountain of fire blown skyward, when the elemental in his profoundly passionate temperament broke loose, he could roar betimes as gently as a dove. Yet, when I last heard him in Paris, the few remaining pupils of Chopin declared that he was brutal in his treatment of their master. He played Rubenstein, not Chopin, said George Matthias to me.

Starting point is 05:01:48 Matthias knew, for he had heard the divine Frederic play. Nevertheless, Rubenstein played Chopin, the greater and the minister, as no one before or since. To each generation it's music-making. The grand manner in piano playing has almost vanished. A few artists still live who illustrate this manner. You may count them on the fingers of one hand. Rosenthal, Dalbert, Carrengue, Friedheim, Risenur had the gift to.

Starting point is 05:02:19 How many others? Paderewski, a heard play in Leipzig in 1912, at a Gevindhouse concert under the baton of the greatest living conductor, Arthur Nikish, and I can vouch for the plangent tone quality and the poetic reading he displayed in his performance of that old Warhorse, the F minor concerto of Chopin. Furthermore, my admiration of Paderewski's gift as a composer, which considerably increased after hearing his Polish symphony interpreted by Nikish. How far away we were from Manru, Josefi, who looked upon Paderewski as a rare personality,

Starting point is 05:02:56 told me that the Polish fantasy for piano and orchestra puzzled him because of its seeming simplicity and figuration. Only the composer, enthusiastically exclaimed, Josefie, could have made it so wonderful. But the grand manner, has it become too artificial, too rhetorical? It has gone out of fashion with the eloquence of the old historians, probably because of the rarity of its exponents, also because it no longer appeals to a matter-of-fact public. List was the first. He was dithyrambic. He was a volcano. Talberg, his one-time rival, possessed all the smooth and icy perfections of Nestle-word pudding. List and reality never had but two rivals close to his throne. Carl Tausig, the Pole, and Anton Rubinstein, the Russian. Van Buehlo was all intellect. His Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms were cerebral, not emotional. He had the temperament, of the pedant. I first heard him in Philadelphia in 1876 at the Academy of Music. He introduced the Tchaikovsky B-flat minor concerto with B.J. Lang directing the orchestra,

Starting point is 05:04:08 a quite superfluous proceeding, as von Buello gave the cues from the keyboard and distinctly cursed the conductor, the band, the composition and his own existence, as befitted a disciple of Schopenhauer. Oh, he could be fiery enough, though in his playing of the romantic the fervent note was absent, but his rhythmic attack was crisp and irresistible. You need only recall the pungency of his reading of Beethoven's scherzo in the sonata opus 31 number three. It was staccato as a hailstorm. Two years later, in Paris, I heard the same concerto played by Nicholas Rubin Stein at the Trosadero, Exposition 1878, the very man who had first flouted the work so rudely that Chikovsky deeply offended

Starting point is 05:04:55 ended, changed the dedication to von Buello. Anton Rubenstein displayed the grand manner. His style was a compound of tiger's blood and honey. Notwithstanding the gossip about his false notes, he wrote a study on false notes as if in derision. He was, with Tausig and Liszt, a supreme stylist. He was not always in practice, and most of the notes he wrote for his numerous tours was composed in haste and repented of at leisure. It is now almost negligible.

Starting point is 05:05:29 The D minor concerto reminds one of a much traversed railroad station, but Rubenstein of Virtuoso. It was in 1873 I heard him, but I was too young to understand him. Fifteen years later, or thereabouts, he gave his seven historical recitals in Paris, and I attended the series not once but twice. He played many composers, but for me he seemed to be playing the Book of Job. the apocalypse and the scarlet Saraphan. He had a ductile tone like a golden French horn,

Starting point is 05:06:02 Josefie's comparison, and the power and passion of the man have never been equaled. Neither Tausig nor Liszt did I hear worse luck, but there were plenty of witnesses to tell me of the differences. List, it seems, when at his best, was both Rubenstein and Tausig combined, with von Boulog thrown in. Anton Rubinstein played every school with constant,

Starting point is 05:06:25 summit skill, from the iron certitudes of Barth's polyphony to the magic murmurs of Chopin and the romantic rustling in the moonlit garden of Schumann. Beethoven too he interpreted with intellectual and emotional vigour. Yet this magnificent calmuck, he wasn't of course though he had asiatic features, grew weary of his instrument, as did Liszt, and fought the stars in their courses by composing. But his name is written ivory and not in enduring music. Scudo said that when Sigismund Talberg played, his scales were like perfectly strong pearls falling on scarlet velvet. With lists the pearls had become red-hot. This extravagant image is of value.

Starting point is 05:07:11 We have gone back to the Talbergian pearls, for too much passion in piano playing as voted bad taste today. Nuance, then colour, and ripe conception. Technique for technique's sake is no longer a desideratum. Furthermore, as Felix Liefels wittily remarked, No one plays the piano badly, just as no one acts Hamlet disreputably. Mr. Lifels, as a veteran contrabacist and, at present, manager of the Philharmonic Society, ought to be an authority on the subject. The old Philharmonic has had all the pianists,

Starting point is 05:07:46 from H.C. Tim, in 1844, a Hummel Concerto, to Talberg and Rubinstein, Josefie, Paderewski, and Josef Hoffman. Truly, the standard of virtuosity is higher than it was a quarter of a century ago. Girls give recitals with programmes that are staggering. The Chopin concertos now occupy the position, technically speaking, of the Hummel and Mendelssohn concertos. Everyone plays Chopin as a matter of course, and, with a few exceptions horribly. Yes, Mr. Lifels is right. No one plays the piano badly, yet New Rubenstein do not materialize.

Starting point is 05:08:25 The year of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, 1876, was a memorable one for visiting pianists. I heard not only Hans von Bulo, but also two beautiful women, one at the apex of her artistic career. Annette Esepov, or Esipova, and Teresa Carrengu, just starting on her triumphal road to fame. Esepova was later the wife of Leschateski. Maybe she was married then, and she was the most of the most of her. poetic of all women pianists that I have heard. Clara Schumann was as musical, but she was aged when I listened to her. Esepova plays Chopin as only a Russian can. They're all Slavs, these Poles and Russians, and no other nation except the Hungarian interpret Chopin. Probably the greatest German virtuoso was Adolf Henselt,

Starting point is 05:09:17 Bavarian-born, they were a resident of Petrograd. He had a Chopin-like temperament and played that master's music so well that Schumann called him the German Chopin. Essepova, I need hardly tell you, communicated no little of her gracious charm to Paderewski. He learned more from her plastic style than from all the precepts of Leschchesecchi. On a hot night in 1876 and in old association hall, I first saw and heard Teresa, then Terracita Carrengue. I stay sore advisedly, for she was a blooming girl and at the time shared the distinction with Adelaide Nielsen and Mrs. Scott Siddens of being one of the three most beautiful women on the stage. Carreño, still vital, still handsome and still the conquering artist, till her death last spring,

Starting point is 05:10:12 was in that faraway day fresh from Venezuela, her pupil of Gottschalk and Anton Rubenstein. She wore a scarlet gown as fiery as her playing, and when I wish to recall her, I close my eyes, and straight away as if in a scarlet mist I see her, hear her, for her playing has always been scarlet to me, as Rubenstein's is golden and Josefie's silvery. The French group I have heard, beginning with Tiedor Ritter, who came to New York in company with Carlotta Patti, Plante, still living and over 80s so I've been told by Monsieur Philippe. Saint-Saint, whom I first saw and heard at the Trostadoe Paris with his pupil Montigny Romaree. Clotilde, Cleber, Diemer, Riesler, the venerable George Matthias, a pupil of Champagne, Raoul Pugnou, who is veritably a pugnacious pianist, Cecile Chamonade, Marie Geel, and her corpulent husband, Alfred Jael. Eugène D'Albert, surely the greatest of Scotch pianists. He was born at Glasgow, the music-olyn. educated in London is another heaven-stormer. I heard him at Berlin some years ago in

Starting point is 05:11:24 Philharmonic Hall and people stood up in their excitement. Lists ready-view-vous. It was the grand manor in its most chaotic form, a musical volcano belching up lava, scoria, rocks, hunks of Beethoven, the apasianata sonata it happened to be, while the infuriated little Vulcan through emotional fuel into his furnace. The unfortunate instrument must have been a mass of splintered steel, wood, and wire after the musical giant had finished. It was a magnificent spectacle and the music glorious. Eugendalbert, whether he is or isn't the son of Carl Tausig, as Weimar gossip had it. Weimar, when in the palmy days, every other pianist you met was a natural son of Liszt, or as pretended to be one, has more than a moiety of that virtuoso's genius. He is a great artist,

Starting point is 05:12:15 and occasionally the magic fire flares and lights up the firmament of music. I think it was in 1879 that Raphael Josefi visited us for the first time, but I didn't hear him until 1880. The reason I remember the date is that this greatly beloved Hungarian made his debut at old chickering hall, then at 5th Avenue and 18th Street, but I saw him at Steinway Hall. Another magician with a peculiarly personal style. in the beginning you thought of the aurora beryllus shooting stars and exquisite meteors a beautiful style though not a classic interpreter then with the years josephi deepened and broadened the iridescent shimmer was never absent no one played the e minor concerto of chopin as did josephi he had the tradition from his beloved master tausig as tausig had it from chopin by way of list tausig always regretted that he had his beloved master tausig had it from chopin by way of list Tausig always regretted that he had never heard Chopin play.

Starting point is 05:13:17 Josefé, in turn, transmitted the tradition to his early pupil, Moritz Rosenthal, in whose repertoire it is the most chopinesque of all his performances. And do you remember the Chevalier de Konsky, Karl Boerman, Franz Rimmel, S.B. Mills, who introduced here so many modern concertos, the huge Norwegian Edmund Neupur, who lived at the Hotel list next to Steinway Hall, Konstantin von Sternberg and Max Voguerich, the Hungarian with the Chopin-like profile, in the same school as Josephi as the capricious Don Pachman. With Josefee, I sat at the first recital of this extraordinary Russian at Chickering Hall

Starting point is 05:14:04 1890. Josefee, with his accustomed generosity of spirit, he was the most sympathetic and human of great virtuosi, at once recognised the artistic worth of Vladimir de Pachman. This last representative of a school that included the names of Hummel, Kramer, Field, Talberg, Chopin, The Little DePachman, he was then bearded like a pirate, captivated us. It was all miniature, without passion or pathos or the grand manner, but in its genre his playing was perfection, the polished perfection of an intricately carved ivory ornament,

Starting point is 05:14:42 De Pacman played certain size of Chopin incomparably, capriciously, even perversely, in a small hall sitting on a chair that precisely suited his fidgety spirit, then if in the mood, a recital by him was something unforgettable. After DePackman, Paderewski, Paderewski, the master colourist, the grand visionary, whose art is often strained, morbid, fantastic. and after Paderewski, why Leopold Godowski, of course, he belongs to the Joseph E. De Pacman, not the Rubenstein-Hosef Hoffman group. I once called him the Superman of piano playing. Nothing like him, as far as I know, is to be found in the history of piano playing since Chopin. He is an apparition. A Chopin doubled by a contrapuntalist, Bach and Chopin.

Starting point is 05:15:35 The spirit of the German canter and the Polish tenor. tone poet in curious conjunction. His playing is transcendental, his piano compositions, the transcendentalism of the future, that way else retrogression, all has been accomplished in ideas and figuration. A new synthesis,

Starting point is 05:15:55 the combination of seemingly disparate elements and styles, with innumerable permutations, he has accomplished. He is a miracle worker, the violet ray, dramatic passion, flame and fury and not present, they would be intruders on his map of music. The piano tone is always legitimate, never forced,

Starting point is 05:16:16 but every other attribute he boasts. His ten digits are ten independent voices recreating the ancient polyphonic art of the Fleming's. He is like a brahma at the piano. Before his serene and all-embracing vision, every school appears and disappears in the void. The beauty of his touch and tone are only matched by the delicate adjustment of his phrasing to the larger curve of the composition.

Starting point is 05:16:42 Nothing musical is foreign to him. He is a pianist for pianists, and I am glad to say that the majority of them gladly recognise this fact. One evening, Godowski was playing his piano sonata with its subtle intimations of Brahms, Chopin and Liszt, and it's altogether Godofsky in colour and rhythmic life. He is the greatest creator of rhythmic value since List, and that is a large order.

Starting point is 05:17:09 When he was interrupted by the entrance of Joseph Hoffman, Godowski and Hoffman are as inseparable as were Chopinlist. Heine called the latter pair the discuree of music. In a Godowski apartment stood several concert grants. Hoffman nonchulently removed his coat, and, making an apology for disturbing us, he went into another room and soon we heard him slowly practicing. What do you suppose?

Starting point is 05:17:34 some new concerto with new-fangled bedevilments, O Sancta Simplicitas, this giant, if ever there was one, played at a funeral tempo, the octave passages in the left hand, of the heroic polonaise of Chopin, Op. 53. Every schoolgirl rattles them off as easy, but, with the humility of a great artist,

Starting point is 05:17:56 Hoffman practiced the section as if it was still a stumbling block. Delens records that Taoisek did the same. Later, conductor Arta Budanski of the Metropolitan Opera dropped in, and several pianists and critics followed, and soon the Polish pianist was playing for us all some well-known compositions by a certain Dvorzky, also an extremely brilliant and effective concert study in C minor by Konstantin von Sternberg. From 1888, when he was a wonder child here, Josio Hoffman's artistic development has been logical and continuous.

Starting point is 05:18:33 His mellow muscularity evokes Rubenstein. No one plays Rubenstein as does this harmonious blacksmith, and with the piety of Rubinstein's pet pupil. I once compared him to a steamhammer, whose marvellous sensitivity enables it to crack an eggshell or crush iron. Hoffman's range of tonal dynamics is unequalled, even in this age of perfected piano technique. He is at home in all schools, and his knowledge is enormous.

Starting point is 05:19:01 At moments, his touch is at Rich's Nysel Quartet Accord. At the famous Rudolf Shermer dinner, given in 1915, among other distinguished guests, there were nearly a score of piano virtuosi. The newspapers humorously commented upon the fact that there was not a squabble. There were so many nationalities one row at least might have been expected. As a matter of fact, if any discussion had arisen, it would not have been over politics, but about the fingering of the double-note study in G-sharp minor of Chopin, so difficult to play slowly,

Starting point is 05:19:37 the most formidable of argument-breeding questions among pianists. A parter of pianists indeed, some in New York because of the war, while Paderewski and Rosenthal were conspicuous by their absence. Think of a few names. Joseph E., he died several months later. Gabriolowich, Hoffman, Godofsky, Karl Friedberg, Mark Hamburg, a heaven-stormer in the Rubenstein-Hurcules Manor,

Starting point is 05:20:04 Leonard Borwick, Alexander Lambert, Ernest Schelling, Stojowski, Percy Granger, the young Sigfried of the Antipides, August Freymour, Cornelius Rubner, and another apparition in the world of piano playing, Ferruccio Bussoni. This Italian, the greatest of Italian piano virtuosi, the history of which can claim such names as Domenico Scarlatti, Clementi, Fumajali, Fmati,

Starting point is 05:20:32 is also a composer who has set agogued conservative critics by the boldness of his imagination. As an artist, he may be said to embody the intellectuality of Wambulo, the technical brilliancy of the list group. Bussoni is eminently a musical thinker. America probably will never again

Starting point is 05:20:54 harbour such a constellation of piano talent. I sometimes wonder if the vanished generation of piano artists played much better than those men. Godowski, Hoffman, the lyric and most musical Harold Boer, the many-sided, richly endowed and charming Ossip Gabrilovich, Hamburg, Bussoni and Paderewski are not often matched. Hina called Talberg a king, list a prophet, Chopin a poet, Hertz and advocate, Karlk Brenner a minstrel, not a negro minstrel for a chalk burner is necessarily white. Madame Playel a Sybil and Dola a pianist. The contemporary piano hierarchy might be thus classed. Joseph Hoffman a king. Paderewski

Starting point is 05:21:41 a poet. Godowski a prophet. Fanny Bloomberg Zeisler a Sybil. Dalbert a Titan. Bussoni a philosopher. Rosenthal a hero and Alexander Lambert a pianist. Mr. Lambert may be congratulated on such an inscription. Dooler was a great technician in his day, and when the friend of pianists, Lambert could return after Schindler, whose visiting card read, Lamida Beethoven,

Starting point is 05:22:10 masters his modesty, an admirable piano virtuoso is revealed. So let him be satisfied with the honourable appellation of pianist. He is in good company. And the ladies, I am sorry I can't say, place or dam, space forbids.

Starting point is 05:22:26 I've heard them all from Arabella Goddard to Madame Montigny Romerie in Paris 1878 with her master Camille Sincennes. From Alid Toppe, Marie Krebs, Anna Melek, Pauline Fishtner Vera Timinoff, Ingeborg Bronsart,

Starting point is 05:22:44 Madeline Schiller to Julia Rivet King. From Cecilia Gaul to Svaldi Claus to Anna Bock, from the Amazon, Sophie Mentor, the most masculine of list players, to Adele Majelis, Yoland, Myro,

Starting point is 05:23:00 and Antonet Zamovska, Adamovska, from Elinka von Ravash to Evel Lijinska, who plays like a house of fire, from Helen Hopekirk to Catherine Goodson, from Clara Schumann to Fanny Bloomfield-Zisler, Olga Samaroff, and the newly-come Brazilian Guillaima Noves,

Starting point is 05:23:21 the list might be undulyly prolonged. I heard Paderewski play last spring. Surely he has now the grand manner in all its dramatic splendour and without its old-fashioned pretentious rhetoric, nor has he lost the lusciousness of his touch, a Caruso voice on the keyboard, or the poetic intensity of his Chopin and Schumann interpretations. He is still Prince Charming.

Starting point is 05:23:49 Not only do I fear prolixity, but the confusing of critical values, for I write from memory and I admit that I've had more pleasure from the intimate pianists than from the forges of tonal thunderbolts. That is, Rubinstein accepted from such masters in miniature

Starting point is 05:24:06 as Josefee, Godowski, Karl Heimann, De Pakman and Paderewski. I find in the fresh sparkling playing of Mishal Levitsky, Benno Mosevic, Gwima Noves, high promise for their future. The latter came here

Starting point is 05:24:24 unheralded and as the pupil of that sterling virtuoso and pedagogue Isador Philippe of the Paris Conservatory. It is noteworthy that only Chopin, Liszt and von Buehle were Christian born among the supreme masters of the keyboard. The rest, with a few

Starting point is 05:24:42 exceptions, were and are members of that race whose religious tenets specifically incline them to the love and practice of music. End of Chapter 15 Chapter 16 of Unicorns This is a Libravox recording All Libravox recordings are in the public domain

Starting point is 05:25:09 For more information or to volunteer Please visit Libravox.org Unicorns by James Hunaker Chapter 16, James Joyce Who is James Joyce? Is a question that was answered by John Quinn Who told us that the new writer was from Dublin and at present residing in Switzerland.

Starting point is 05:25:30 That he is not in good health, his eyes trouble him, and that he was once a student in theology, but soon gave up the idea of becoming a priest. He is evidently a member of a new group of young Irish writers who see their country and countrymen in anything but a flattering light. Ireland, surely the most beautiful

Starting point is 05:25:51 and most melancholy island on the globe, is not the Isle of Saints for those iconoclass, George Moore is a poet who happens to write English, though he often thinks in French. Bernard Shaw, notwithstanding his native wit, is of London and the Londoners. While Yeats and Sing are essentially Celtic and both poets, yes, and there is the delightful James Stephen who mingles angels pin feathers with rainbow gold, a magic decoction of which we never weary. But James Joyce, potentially a poet and a realist of the de Montpoucant breed, envisageesies

Starting point is 05:26:27 envisages Dublin and the Dubliners with a cruel scrutinizing gaze, he is as truthful as Chekhov and as gray, that Chekhov compared with whose the realism of de Montpast is romantic bric-a-brac, gilded with a fine style. Joyce is as implacably naturalistic as the Russian, in his vision of the sombre, mean, petty, dusty, commonplaces in middle-class life, and he sometimes suggests that the Frenchman in his,

Starting point is 05:26:57 clear, concise, technical methods. The man is indubitably a fresh talent. Emerson, after his experiences in Europe, he became an armchair traveler. He positively despised the idea of voyaging across the water to see what is just as good at home. He calls Europe a tapeworm in the brain of his countrymen.

Starting point is 05:27:19 The stuff of all countries is just the same. So Ralph Waldo sat in his chair and enjoyed thinking about Europe, thus evading the worries of going there too often. It has its merit, this Amazonian way, particularly for souls easily disillusioned. To anticipate too much of a foreign city may result in disappointment. We have all had this experience. Paris resembles Chicago or Vienna is a second Philadelphia at times. It depends on the color of your mood. Few countries have been so persistently misrepresented. as Ireland. It is

Starting point is 05:27:57 lauded to the 11th heaven of the Burmese, or it is a place full of fighting devils in a hell of crazy politics. Of course it is neither, nor is it the land of lover and lever. Handy and Harry Laraca are there, but you never encounter them in Dublin.

Starting point is 05:28:15 John Singh got nearer to the heart of the peasantry and Yates and Lady Gregory brought back from the hidden spaces, fairies, and heroes. Is Father Ralph by Gerald O'Donovan of Horatius, picture of Irish priesthood and college life? Is the fiction of Mr. Joyce

Starting point is 05:28:31 representative of the middle class and of the Jesuits? A cloud of contradictory witnesses passes across the sky. What is the Celtic character? Dionne Bosikos the Shah Run? Or isn't the pessimistic dreamer with the soul of a wild goose

Starting point is 05:28:46 depicted in George Moore's story the real man? Celtic magic, cried Matthew Arnold, he should have said Irish magic. for while the irishman is the celt he is unlike his brethren across the channel perhaps he is nearer to the sarmizier than the continental celt ireland and poland the irish and the polish disfadisfied no matter under which king not playboys of the western world but martyrs to their unhappy temperaments the dublin of mr joyce shows another variation of this always interesting theme it is a rather depressing picture his of the daily doings of his contemporaries. His novel is called

Starting point is 05:29:29 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a title quite original and expressive of what follows, also a title that seems to have emerged from the catalog of an art collector. It is a veritable portrait of the artist as a boy, a youth, and a young man. From school to college, from the brothel to the confessional, from his mother's apron strings to coarse revelry.

Starting point is 05:29:52 The hero is put to the torture by art, and relates the story of his blotched yet striving soul. We do not recall a book like this since the autobiography en route of J.K. Wismos. This Parisian of Dutch extraction is in the company of James Joyce. Neither writer stops at the halfway house of reticence. It is the house of flesh in its most sordant aspects, and the human soul is occasionally illuminated by gleams from the grace of God, with both men the love of Rabalaisian speech is marked.

Starting point is 05:30:27 This, if you please, is a Celtic trait. Not even the Elizabethans so joyed in green words, as the French say, as do some Irish. Of richest hue are his curses, and the prince of obliquity himself must chuckle when he overhears one Irishman consign another to everlasting damnation by the turn of his tongue. Stephen, the hero of a portrait of the artist as a young man,

Starting point is 05:30:52 tells his student friend about his father. These were his attributes. A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a tax-gatherer, a bankrupt, at present, appraiser of his own past. He could talk the devil out of the liver wing of a turkey,

Starting point is 05:31:20 as they say up Corkway. The portrait is well-nigh-perfect, the wild goose over again and ever on the wing. Stephen became violently pious after a retreat at the Jesuits. From the extreme of riotous living, he was transformed into a militant Catholic. The Reverend Fathers had hopes of him. He was an excellent Latinist,

Starting point is 05:31:43 but his mind was too speculative. Later it proved his spiritual undoing. To analyze the sensibility of a soul, mounting on flaming pinions to God is easier than to describe the modulations of a moral recidivist. Stephen fell away from his faith, though he did not again sink into the slew of Dublin low life. Cranley, the student, saw through the hole in his skeptical millstone. It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranley said dispassionately, how your mind is super-saturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve. A profound remote.

Starting point is 05:32:20 mark one's a roman catholic always a roman catholic particularly if you are born in ireland mr joyce holds the scales evenly he neither abuses nor praises he is evidently out of key with religious life yet he speaks of the jesuits with affection and admiration the sermons preached by them during the retreat are models they are printed in full strange material for a novel and he can show us the black black hatred caused by the clash of political and religious opinions. There is a scene of this sort in the house of Stephen's parents that simply blazes with verity. At a Christmas dinner, the argument between Dante, a certain Mrs. Roridan, and Mr. Casey spoils the affair. Stephen's father carves the turkey and tries to stop the mouths of the angry man and woman with food. The mother implores. Stephen stolidly gobbles watching the row, which culminates with Mr. Casey losing his temper. He has had several tumblers of Mountain Dew and is a little...

Starting point is 05:33:26 How come you so? He bursts forth. No God in Ireland. We have had too much God in Ireland. Away with God. Blasphemer! Devil! Screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting in his face. Devil out of hell!

Starting point is 05:33:42 We won! We crushed him to death! Thiend! The door slammed behind her. Mr. Casey suddenly. about his head on his hands in a sob of pain. Poor Parnell, he cried oddly, My dear king!

Starting point is 05:33:57 Naturally the dinner was not a success. Stephen noted that there were tears in his father's eyes at the mention of Parnell, but that he seemed debonair enough when the old woman unpacked her heart of vile words like a drab. There is no denying that the novel is as a whole hardly cheerful. Its grip on life, its intensity, its evident truth and unflinching acceptance of facts will make a portrait disagreeable to the average reader.

Starting point is 05:34:25 There is relief in the Trinity College episodes, humor of a Saturnine kind in the artistic armory of Mr. Joyce. There is no ironist like an Irishman. The book is undoubtedly written from a full heart, but the author must have sighed with relief when he wrote the last line. No one may tell the truth with impunity, and the portrait of Stephen in his, its objective frigidity as an artistic performance, and its passionate personal note is bound to give offense in every quarter. It is too Irish to be liked by the Irish, not an infrequent paradox. The volume of tales entitled Dubliners reveals a wider range, a practiced technical hand, and a gift for etching characters that may be compared to de Montpesson. A big comparison,

Starting point is 05:35:16 but read such masterpieces in pity and irony as the dead, a painful case, the boarding-house, or to gallants, and be convinced that we do not exaggerate. Dublin, we have said elsewhere, is a huge whispering gallery. Scandal of the most insignificant order never lacks multiple echoes. From Marion Square, from the shell-born to Dalke or Drumchondra, from the monument to chapel zoid, the repercussion of spoken gossip is unfailing.

Starting point is 05:35:46 The book Dubliners is filled with Dublin-esque antidotes. It is charged with the sights and scents and gestures of the town, the slackers who pester servant girls for their shillings to spend on whiskey. The young man in the boarding-house who succumbs to the planted charms of the landlady's daughter to fall into the matrimonial trap, only dot Montpesson could better this telling of this too commonplace story. The middle-aged man, parsiminous as to his emotions and the tragic endings of a love affair that had hardly begun. And the wonderfully etched plate called the Dead,

Starting point is 05:36:22 with its hundred fine touches of comedy and satire, these but proved the claim of James Joyce's admirers that he is a writer signally gifted. A malevolent fairy seemingly made him a misanthrope, with Spinoza who could say, oh, terrifying irony, that mankind is not necessary in the eternal scheme. We hope that with the years he's, he may become mellower, but that he will never lose the appreciation of life's more bitter flavors.

Starting point is 05:36:52 In Sippin novelists are legion. He is Whistmose Little Brother in his flair for disintegrating character. But yet, an Irishman, who sees the shining vision in the sky, a vision that too often vanishes before he can pin his beauty on canvas. But yet, an Irishman in his sense of the murderous humor of such a story as Ivy Day in the committee room, which would bring to a Tammany healer what Henry James called the emotion of recognition. Ah, the wild goose, the flying dream.

Starting point is 05:37:26 End of chapter 16. Chapter 17 of Unicorns. This is a Librivox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Bookworm. Unicorns by James Haneker Creative Involution

Starting point is 05:37:55 Israel Zangwell in the papers he contributed once upon a time to the Strand magazine and later reunited in a book bearing the happy title Without Prejudice spoke of women writers as being significant chiefly in their self-revelation what they tell of themselves

Starting point is 05:38:15 is of more value than what they write about Whether Mr. Zangwill now believes this matters little in the discussion of an unusual book by a woman. Perhaps today he would open both eyes widely after reading creative involution by Cora L. Williams, MS, with an opposite introduction by Edwin Markham. Miss Williams deals with no less a bagatelle

Starting point is 05:38:41 than the fourth dimension of space. What we do not know we fear, and fear is always capitalized. Speculative as is her work, she is not a new thoughter, a Christian scientist, or a member of any of the other queer ragtag and bobtail beliefs and superstitions. Fortune-telling astrology, selling futures in the next life, table-rapping and such like. Cora Lenore Williams is an authority in mathematics, as was the brilliant and happy Sonia Kovalevska. Her ideas then are not verbal wind-pudding, but have to be a very bad-puding, but have to be a good-olynousy, have a basis of mathematics and the investigations of the laboratory, where chemists and physicists

Starting point is 05:39:25 are finding that the conduct of certain molecules and crystals is best explained as a fourth-dimensional activity. We have always enjoyed the idea of the fourth spatial dimension. The fact that it is an X in the plotting of mathematicians in general does not hinder it from being a fascinating theme. J.K.F. Zolnar of Leipzig proved to his own satisfaction the existence of a fourth dimension when he turned an India rubber ball inside out without tearing it. Later he became a victim to incurable melancholy. No wonder, if you have read Cayley or Abbott's Flatland or the ingenious speculations of Simon Newcom and W. K. Clifford, you will learn the attractions of the subject. Perpetual motion, squaring the circle, are only variants of the alchemical pursuit of the philosopher's stone,

Starting point is 05:40:21 the transmutation of the baser metals, the cabalistic abracadabra, the quest of the absolute. Man can't live on machinery alone, and the underfed soul of the past period of positivism craves more spiritual nourishment today. Hasn't the remarkable mathematician Henri Poincarer, author of science and hypothesis, the value of science, science and method, declared that between the construction of the spirit and the absolute of truth, there is an abysm caused by free choice and the voluntary elimination, which have necessitated such inferences. Note the word free. Free will is restored to its old and honorable estate in the hierarchy of thought.

Starting point is 05:41:08 The caste iron determinism of the 70s and 80s has gone to join the materialistic ideas of Pichner and Clifford. It is a pluralistic world now, and lordly intuition, a dangerous vocable, rules over mere mental processes. There is, as George Henry Lewis asserted, profound truth in the Cullen paradox. That is, there are more false facts than false theories current.

Starting point is 05:41:37 science only attains the knowledge of the correspondence and relativity of things. No mean intellectual feat, by the way, but not of the things themselves. One must join, adds Pankare, to the faculty of reasoning, the gift of direct sympathy. In a word, intuition. Even mathematics as an exact science is not immutable, and the geometries of Lebachevsky and Raiman are as legitimate as euclitz, And at this point the earth beneath us begins to tremble and the stars to totter in their spheres. Is the age of miracles now?

Starting point is 05:42:17 Perhaps music is in the fourth dimension. Time may be in two dimensions. Heraclitus before Berkson compared time to a river always flowing, yet a permanent river. If we emerged from this stream at a certain moment and entered it an hour later, Would it not signify that time has two dimensions? And where does music stand in the eternal scheme of things? Are not harmony with its vertical structure and melody with its horizontal flow proof that music is another dimension in time?

Starting point is 05:42:52 Miss Williams' notion of the fourth spatial dimension is a spiritual one. Creative involution is to supersede the Darwinian evolution. Again, the interior revolution described for our salvation in the epistles of the Apostle Paul. All roads lead to religion. Expell religion forcibly and it returns under strange disguises, usually as debasing superstitions. Yet religion without dogma is like a body without a skeleton.

Starting point is 05:43:25 It can't be made to stand upright. Mathematicians are poets, and religion is the poetry of the poor, just as philosophy is the diversion of profite. professors. Modern science, said Malek, put out the footlights of life stage when it denied religion, but matter, in the light of recent experiment, is become spirit, energy, anything but gross matter. Tyndall might have to revise the conclusions of his once-famous Belfast address in the presence of radium. Remy de Gourmet said that the essential thing is to search the eternal in the diverse and fleeting movements of form.

Starting point is 05:44:05 From a macrocosmic monster, our gods are become microcosmic. God may be a molecule, a cell, a god to put in a file. Thus far has the zigzag caprice of theory attained. And religion is a sum of scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties, says Solomon Reynach in Orpheus. Boussay did not write his variations in vain. All is vanity, even doctrinal fluctuation. Gette has warned us that man is not born to solve the mystery of existence,

Starting point is 05:44:42 but he must nevertheless attempt it in order that he may learn how to keep within the limits of the knowable. Gette detested all thinking about thought. Spinoza was his only philosophical recreation. Man must no longer be egocentric. The collective soul is born. The psychology of the mob, according to Professor Le Bonn, is different from the psychology of the individual. We know this from the mental workings of a jury.

Starting point is 05:45:12 Twelve otherwise intelligent men put in a jury box contaminate each other's will so that their united judgment is as a rule that of a full-fledged imbecile. Mark Twain noted this in his accustomed humorous, a mordant humor, fashion, adding that trial by jury was all very well in the time of Alfred the Great,

Starting point is 05:45:35 candle clocks and small communities. Miss Williams, who sees salvation for the single soul in the collective soul, not necessarily socialistic, nevertheless warns parents against the dangers in our public school system, where the individuality of the child is so often disturbed, if not destroyed, by class teaching. Mob psychology is always false psychology. The crowd obliterates the ego. Yet, to collect,

Starting point is 05:46:05 collective consciousness may belong the future. It is all very well for Malek to call war the glorification, the result, and the prop of limited class interests. This was years ago. Statly sedate stable is the class that won't tolerate war, a class of moral lollipops. War we must have. It is one of the prime conditions of struggling existence. As belief in some totem, fetish, taboo, is the basis of all superstitions.

Starting point is 05:46:35 So the superstition of yesterday builds the cathedrals of faith today. Read Fraser's Golden Bow, James Fraser, who is the Darwin of Social Anthropology. Happiness requires limitations, as a wine needs a glass to hold it. And if patriotism is a crime of Lee's majesty against mankind, then be it so. But like the poor, war and patriotism are precious senses in the scheme of life. and we shall always have them with us. However, the warning of Miss Williams is a timely one. At school, our children's souls are clogged with bricks and mortar,

Starting point is 05:47:17 instead of being buoyant and individual. She quotes, and her little volume contains a mosaic of apt quotations, with evident approbation from some neglected factors in evolution by the late H.M. Bernard, an English thinker. Organic life is thus seen advancing out of the dim past upon a series of waves, each of which can be scanned in detail until we come to that one on which we ourselves, the organisms of today and the human societies to which we belong, are swept onward.

Starting point is 05:47:54 Here we must necessarily pause, but can we doubt that the great organic rhythm, which has brought life so far, will carry it on to still greater heights in the unknown future. Rhythm. Measured flow is the Shibboleth. Zarathustra tells us that man is a discord and hybrid of plant and ghost. I teach you beyond man, Superman. Man is something that will be surpassed. Once man was ape and is ape in a higher degree than any ape. Man is a rope connecting animal and beyond man. Believe that which thou seest not, Christ Lobert, in his marvelous mask of mythologies ancient and modern, the temptation of St. Anthony. Thertelian said the same centuries before the Frenchman. Believe what is impossible.

Starting point is 05:48:48 We all do. Perhaps it is the price we pay for cognition. Miss Williams is not a Berksonian, though she appreciates his plastic theories. She has a receptive mind. Henri Bergson is a mystagogue, and all mystagogues are mythomaniacs. He has yet to answer Professor Hugh S. R. Eliot's three questions. 1. Berksson says, time is a stuff both resistant and substantial. Where is the specimen on which this allegation is founded?

Starting point is 05:49:22 2. Consciousness is to some extent independent of cerebral structure. Professor Bergson thinks he is disproving a crude theory. theory of localization of mental qualities. Will he furnish evidence of its existence apart from local structure? 3. Instinct leads us to a comprehension of life that intellect can never give. Will Professor Berksson furnish instances of the successes of instinct in biological inquiries where intellect has failed? From modern science and the illusions of Professor Berkson, 1912. These metaphysical curiosities, as they are rather contemptuously called by Sir Ray Lancaster in his preface to this solidly reasoned computation, are the pabulum of numerous persons, dilettantes,

Starting point is 05:50:13 with a craving for an embellished theory of the grant perhaps. Miss Williams is not the dupe of such silken sophistries, and while her divagations are sometimes in the air, which, like the earth, have bubbles, as was observed by the greatest of poets, She plans her feet on tangible affirmations, and to have faith, we must admit the elative sense of John Henry Newman. Thus, the wheel is come full circle. Creative involution will please mystics and mathematicians alike. The author Somersaults in the Vasty Blue, but safely volplanes to Mother Earth.

Starting point is 05:50:54 End of Creative Involution, recording by Bookworm. 18 of Unicorns. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Olivia. Unicorns by James Hunaker, Chapter 18. Four Dimensional Vistas.

Starting point is 05:51:25 Hamlet, sometime Prince of Denmark, warned his friend that there were more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of in his philosophy. Now, both Hamlet and Horatio had absorbed contemporary wisdom of Wittenberg, and, let it be said in passing, that their knowledge did not lag behind ours, metaphysically speaking. Nevertheless, Hamlet, if he had lived longer, might have said that no philosophy would ever solve the riddle of the Sphinx, that we never know, only name things. Noah is the supreme symbol of science, he, the first nameer of the animals in the ark. The world of sensation is our arc, and we are one branch of the animal.

Starting point is 05:52:05 family. We come whence we know not, and go where we shall never guess. Standing on this tiny isle of error, we call the present, we think backward and live forward. Hamlet, the skeptical, would now demand something more tangible than the grand, perhaps. My kingdom for a fulcrum, he might cry to Horatio, on which I may rest my lever and pry this too, too solid earth up to the starry skies. With what implement? Religion? Remember, Hamlet was a Catholic, too sensitive to send unshrived to Hell's Fire, the soul of his uncle. Philosophy? Read Jules Laforg's Hamlet and realize that, if he were alive today, the melancholy prince might be a delicate scoffer at all fables, a hamlet who had read Schopenhauer. What then the escape? We all need more elbow room in the infinite. The answer is, the fourth dimension in higher space.

Starting point is 05:53:03 Eureka. After studying St. Teresa, John of the Cross, St. Ignatius, or the selections in Vaughn's hours with the mystics, even the doubting Thomas is forced to admit that here there is no trace of rambling discourse, fugitive ideation, half-stamored enigmas. On the contrary, the true mystic abhors the cloudy, and his vision pierces with crystalline clearness, the veil of the visible world. As literary style, we find sharp contours and affirmations. Mysticism is not all cobweb, lace, and opal fire. Remember that we are not stressing the validity of either the vision or its consequent judgments.

Starting point is 05:53:44 We only wish to emphasize the absence of muddy thinking in these writings. This quality of precision, allied to an eloquent, persuasive style, we encounter in Claude Braggdon's four-dimensional vistas. The author is an architect and has written much of his art and of projective ornament. He was a scamman lecturer at the Chicago Art Institute in 1915. He is a mystic. He is also eminently practical. His contribution to aesthetics in The Beautiful Necessity is suggestive,

Starting point is 05:54:16 and on the purely technical side, valuable. But Mr. Braggdon, being both a mathematician and a poet, does not stop at three-dimensional existence. Like the profound English mystic William Blake, he could ask, How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way? is an immense world of delight closed by your senses five. What is the fourth dimension?

Starting point is 05:54:39 A subtle transposition of precious essences, from the earthly to the spiritual plane. We live in a world of three dimensions, the symbols of which are length, breadth, thickness, a species of triangular world, a prison for certain souls who see in the category of time an escape from that other imperative,

Starting point is 05:54:58 space. However, not the categorical imperative of Kant, and its acid moral convention. Helmholtz and many mathematicians employed the N-dimension as a working hypothesis. It is useful in some analytical problems, but it is not apprehended by the grosser senses. Pascal, great thinker and mathematician, had his abyss. It was his fourth dimension, and he never walked abroad without the consciousness of it at his side. This illusion or obsession was the result of a severe mental shock early in his life. Many of us are like the French philosopher. We have our abyss, mystic or real.

Starting point is 05:55:38 Mr. Bragdon quotes from the mathematician Boli, who, in 1823, declared, with regard to Euclid's so-called axiom of parallels, I will draw two lines through a given point, both of which will be parallel to a given line. Space, then, may be curved in another dimension. Mr. Bragdon believes that it is, though he does not attempt to prove it, as that would be impossible,

Starting point is 05:56:01 but he gives his readers the chief points in the hypothesis. The end dimension may be employed as a lever to the imagination. Even revealed religion demands our faith, and imagination is the prime agent in the interpretation of the universe, according to the gospel of mystic mathematics. Nature geometrises, said Emerson, and it is interesting to note the imagery of transcendentalism through the ages. It is invariably geometrical.

Starting point is 05:56:27 spheres, planes, cones, circles, spirals, tetragrams, pentagrams, ellipses, and whatnot, a cubist universe. Xenophonies said that God is a sphere, and then there are the geometrical patterns made by birds on the wing. Heaven in any religion is another sphere. Swedenborg offers a series of planes, many mansions for the soul at its various stages of existence. The Bible, the mystical teachings of Mother Church, why evoke familiar witnesses? We are hemmed in by riddles, and the magnificent and mysterious tumult of life asks for the eye of imagination, which is also the eye of faith. The cold fire and dark light of the mystics must not repel us by their strangeness. Not knowledge, but perception is power, and a psychic is the signpost of the future.

Starting point is 05:57:21 What do all these words mean? matter, energy, spirit, cells, molecules, electrons, but the same old thing. I am a colony of cells, yet that fact does not get me closer to the core of the soul. What will? A fourth spatial dimension, answers Claude Bragdon. Truly a poetic concept. He calls man a space eater. Human ambition is to annihilate space. Wars are fought for space, and every step in knowledge is based upon its mastery. What miracles are wireless telegraphy, flying machines, the Rentken ray? Astronomy, what ghastly ghosts it shows us in space. Time and space were abolished as sense allusions by the worthy Bishop of Cloin, George Berkeley, but as we are up to our eyes in quotidian life, which grows over and

Starting point is 05:58:12 about us like grass, we cannot shake off the oppression. First thought, and then realized, these marvels are now accepted as matter of fact, because mankind has been told the technique of them, as if any explanation can be more than nominal. We shall never know the real nature of the phenomena that crowd in on us from lust to dust, not even that synthesis of the five senses, the sixth or sex sense, with its evanescent ecstasy, cuts deeply into the darkness. There may be a seventh sense, a new dimension, intimations of which are setting advanced thinkers on fresh trails. But there is as yet no tangible proof. Philosophers, who, like some singers, bray their brainless convictions to a gaping auditory, ask of us much more credence, and little or no

Starting point is 05:59:03 imagination. As that old mole working in the ground, gravitation, is defied by aeroplanes, then we should not despair of any hypothesis which permits us a peep through the partly open door. Plato's Cavern and the Shadows. Who knows, but in this universe there may be a crevice through which filters the light of another life. Emerson, who shed systems, yet never organized one, hints at aerial perspectives. A flight through the sky with the sun bathing in the blue jolts one's conception of a rigid, finite world. In such perilous altitudes, I have enjoyed this experience, and felt a liberation of the spirit which has no parallel. even when listening to Bach or Beethoven or Chopin.

Starting point is 05:59:49 Music, indeed, is the nearest approach to psychic freedom. Mr. Bragdon approvingly quotes Gerta's expression, Frozen Music, applied to Gothic architecture. Standahl appropriated this phrase. For us, the flying buttress is aspiring, and the pointed arch is a fugue. Our author is rich in his analogies, and, like Sir Thomas Brown, sees Quinn-Kunxes in everything.

Starting point is 06:00:14 His particular Quinn-Kunx, being higher space. The precise patterns in our brain like those of the ant, bee, and beaver, which enable us to perceive and build the universe, otherwise called innate ideas, are geometrical. Space is the first and final illusion. Time, which is not a stuff both resistant and substantial, as Henry Bergson declares, is perhaps the fourth dimension in the guise of a sequence of states, and not grasped simultaneously, as is the idea of space, that time can shrink and expand opium eaters who are not always totally drugged by their dreams, assure us.

Starting point is 06:00:54 A second becomes an eon. And space curvature? Is it any wonder that Lewis Carroll, who wrote those extraordinary parables for little folk through the looking glass and Alice in Wonderland, was a mathematician? A topsy-turvy world, it is even upside down, as an optical image.

Starting point is 06:01:13 The other side of good and evil may be around the corner. Eternity can lurk in a molecule too tiny to harbor Queen Mab. And we may all live to see the back of our own heads without pairing in mirrors. That astral trunk, once so fervently believed in, may prove a reality.

Starting point is 06:01:32 It is situated behind the ear and is a long tube that ascends to the planet Saturn, and by its aid we should be enabled to converse with spirits. The Pinaeo gland is the seat of the soul, and miracles fence us in at every step. We fill our belly with the east wind of vain desires. We eat the air, promise-crammed. The world is but a point in the universe, and our universe is only one of an infinite series. There was no beginning, there is no end, eternity is now, though death and the tax-gatherer

Starting point is 06:02:05 never cease their importunings. All this Mr. Braggden does not say, though he leans to be able to be able to be in. heavily on the arcana of the ancient wisdom. The truth is that the majority of humans are mentally considered vegetables, living in two dimensions. To keep us responsive to spiritual issues, as people were awakened in Swift's Lapuda by flappers, is a service performed by such transcendentalists as C. Howard Hinton, author of the Fourth Dimension, Claude Bragdon, and Coralinor Williams. Their thought is not new. It was hoary with age when Greeks went to old Egypt for fresh learning. Noah conversed with his wives in the same terminology, but its application is novel, as are the personal nuances.

Starting point is 06:02:50 The idea of a fourth spatial dimension may be likened to a fresh lens in the telescope or microscope of speculation. For the present writer, the hypothesis is just one more incursion into the fairyland of metaphysics. Without fairies, the heart grows old and dusty. The seven arts are fairy tales in fascinating shapes. As for the paradise problem, it is horribly sublime for me, this idea of an eternity to be spent in a place which, with its silver, gold, plush, and diamonds, seems like the dream of a retired pawnbroker. The eternal recurrence is more consoling.

Starting point is 06:03:28 The only excuse for life is its brevity. Why then do we yearn for that unending corridor through which in processional rhythms we move, our shoulders bowed by the burden of our chimera, our ego? I confess that I prefer to watch, on the edge of some vast promontory, the swift approach of a dark sun, rushing out from the primordial depths of interstellar spaces, to the celestial assignation made at the beginning of time for our little solar system, whose provinciality, remote from the populous path of the Milky Way, has hitherto escaped colliding with a segment of the infinite.

Starting point is 06:04:07 perhaps in that apocalyptic flare-up, surely a more cosmical and heroic death than stewing in greasy bliss, higher space may be manifested, and time and tri-dimensional space be no more. The rest is silence. End of Chapter 18, read by Olivia. Chapter 19 of Unicorns This is a laborer All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org.

Starting point is 06:04:57 Recording by Louise J. Bell Unicorns by James Hunaker Chapter 19 O.W. It is an enormous advertisement nowadays to win a reputation as a mark. whether to an idea, a vice, or a scolding wife. You have a label by which a careless public is able to identify you. Oscar Wilde was a born advertiser. From the sunflower days to

Starting point is 06:05:37 Holloway jail, and from the jail to the virgins of Dieppe, he kept himself in the public eye. Since his death, the number of volumes dealing with his glittering personality, negligible verse, and more or less insincere prose, have been steadily accumulating. Why, I am at a loss to understand. If he was a victim to British middle-class morality, then have done with it, while regretting the affair. If he was not, all the more reason to maintain silence. But no, the clamor increases, with the result that there are many young people who believe that Oscar was a great man, a great writer, when in reality he was neither. Here is Alfred Douglas, slamming the memory of his old chum in a not particularly edifying manner.

Starting point is 06:06:43 though he tells some truths, wholesome and unwholesome, Henley paid an unpleasant tribute to his dead friend, Robert Lewis Stevenson, but the note of hatred was absent. Evidently, literary depreciation was the object. However, there are many to whom the truth will be more welcome than the spectacle of broken friendship, Another and far more welcome book is that written by Martin Birnbaum,

Starting point is 06:07:22 a slender volume of fragments and memories. His Oscar Wilde is the Oscar of the first visit to New York, and there are lots of anecdotes and facts that are sure to please collectors of Wildiana, or Oscarianna, which is it? Pictures, too. I confess that his early portraits flatter the Irish writer. He looked like an old maid in a boarding house, said a well-known Philadelphia portrait painter. He was ugly, not a beautiful Greek god as his fervent admirers think. His mouth was loose, ill-shaped, his eyes dull and draggy.

Starting point is 06:08:15 his forehead narrow, the cheeks flabby, his teeth protruding and horsey, his head and face was pear-shaped. He was a big fellow, as was his brother, Willie Wilde, who once lived in New York. But he gave no impression of muscular strength or manliness. On the other hand, he was not a cissy, as so many, have said. Indeed, to know him was to like him. He was the real stuff, as the slang goes. And if he had only kept away from a pestilential group of flatterers and spongers, his end might have been different. I have heard many eloquent talkers in my time. Best of them all was Barbé-Douet-Villy of Paris.

Starting point is 06:09:18 after whom Oscar palpably modeled, lace cuffs, clouded cane, and other minor affectations. But when Oscar was in the vein, which was usually once every 24 hours, he was inimitable. Edgar Saltus will bear me out in this.

Starting point is 06:09:43 For copiousness, sustained wit, and verbal brilliancy, the man had few equals. It was amazing, his conversation. I met him when he came here, and once again much later. Possibly that is why I care so little for his verse, a postichio of Swinburne,

Starting point is 06:10:09 in the wholly admirable biography of this poet by Mr. Goss, references made to O.W. by the irascible hermit of Pud I thought he seemed a harmless young nobody. I should think you, in America, must be as tired of his name as we are in London of Mr. Barnum's and his jumbos. Milton, Tennyson, or for his prose, a dilution of Walter Pater and Flaubert. His Dorian Gray, apart from the inversion element, is poor huismans.

Starting point is 06:10:51 Just look into that masterpiece, Arrubour, not to mention Poe's tale, the oval portrait, while Salome is Flaubert in operetta form, his gorgeous Herodius watered down for uncritical public consumption. It is safe to say the piece,

Starting point is 06:11:15 which limps dramatically, would never have been seriously considered, if not for the Ricard Strauss musical setting. As for the vaunted essay on socialism, I may only call attention to one fact, that is, it does not deal with socialism at all, but with philosophical anarchism. Besides, it is not remarkable in any particular. His intentions is his best. because his most spoken prose. The fairy tales are graceful exercises by a versatile writer with an excellent memory.

Starting point is 06:12:03 But if I had children, I'd give them the Alice in Wonderland books, through which sweeps a bracing air, and not the hot-house atmosphere of wild. The plays are fascinating as fireworks, and as remote from human interest. Perhaps I'm in error, yet, after reading Pater, Swinburne, Rosetti, Huismans, I prefer them to the wild imitations,

Starting point is 06:12:37 strained as they are through his very gay fancy. He wasn't an evil-minded man. He posed a la Byron and Baudelaire, but to hear his jolly laughter was to rout any notion of the morbid or the sinister. He was materialistic, he loved good cookery, old wines, and strong tobacco. Positively, the best book, Wilde, Wilde, was The Green Carnation by Robert Hitchens, which book gossip avers set the ball rolling that fetched up behind prison bars. In everyday life, he was a charming, companionable, and very human chap,

Starting point is 06:13:37 and, as Frederick James Gregg says, dropped more witty epigrams in an hour than Whistler did annually. The best thing Whistler ever said to Wilde was his claiming, in advance, as his own, anything Oscar might utter. And here, Whistler was himself borrowing an epigram of Baudelaire, as he borrowed from the same source and amplified the idea that nature is monotonous, nature is a plagiarist from art, and all the rest of such paradoxical chatter and inconsequent humor.

Starting point is 06:14:20 Both Whistler and Wilde have been taken too seriously, I mean on this side. Whistler was a great artist. Wild was not. Whistler discoursed wittily, waspishly, but he wasn't knee-high to a grasshopper when confronted with Wild. As for the tragic denouement which has been thrashed to death by those who know,

Starting point is 06:14:53 suffice to add that William Butler Yates told me that he called at the Wilde home after the scandal had broken, and saw Willie Wilde, who roundly denounced his brother for his truly brave attitude, always attitudes with Oscar. He would not be persuaded to leave London, and perhaps it was the wisest act of his life. Though neither the ballot of Reading jail nor de profundus carry conviction, need I say that my judgment is personal? I have read, in cold type, that Pater was a forerunner of Wild, that Wilde is a second Jesus Christ, which latter statement, stuns one.

Starting point is 06:15:49 The wit maniacs are fond of claiming the same for Walt, who is not unlike that silly and sinister monster described by Rabelais as quite overshadowing the earth with its gigantic wings, and after dropping vast quantities of mustard seed on the embattled hosts below, flew away yopping, Carnival, Carnival! Carnival!

Starting point is 06:16:16 Carnival. For me, he simply turned into superior journalism the ideas of Swinburne, Pater, Flaubert, Guisemans, De Quincey, and others. If his readers would only take the trouble to study the originals, there might be less talk of his originality. I say all this without any disparagements of his genuine gifts. He was a born newspaper man. Henry James calls attention to the fact that the so-called aesthetic movement in England never flowered into anything so artistically perfect

Starting point is 06:17:06 as the novels of Gabriel de Nounziot, which is true, but he could have joined to the name of the Italian poet and playwright, That of Aubrey Beardsley, the one genius of the 1890s. Beardsley gave us something distinctly individual. Wild, a veritable cabotin, did not. Nothing but his astounding conversation. And that, alas, is a fast-fading memory.

Starting point is 06:17:49 End of Chapter 19. recording by Louise J. Bell Sebastian Pole, California Chapter 20 of Unicorns This is a Librevox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org.

Starting point is 06:18:16 Recording by Mathia Brachich. Unicorns by James Hanuker. Chapter 20. A synthesis of the seven arts. Nothing new in all this talk about a fusion of the Seventh Arts. It has been tried for centuries. Richard Wagner's attempt just graze success, though the aesthetic principle at the base of his theory is eminently unsound.

Starting point is 06:18:40 Pictures, sculpture, tone, acting, poetry, and the rest are to be found in the Wagnerian music drama. But the very titles are significant. A hybrid art is there. With Wagner, music is the master. His poetry, his drama, are not so important, though his scenic sense is unfailing. Every one of his works delights the eye, truly moving pictures. Yet if the lips of the young man of Urbino had opened to music, they would have sung the melodies of the young man of Salzburg. Years ago, Sadikichi Hartman, the Japanese poet from Hamburg, made a bold attempt in this direction, adding to other ingredients,

Starting point is 06:19:25 of the sensuous dew, perfume. The affair came off at Carnegie Hall, and we were wafted on the wings of song and smell to Japan. Only I detected the familiar odor of old shoes and the scent of armpits, of the latter Walt Whitman has triumphantly sung. A New York audience is not as pleasant to the nostrils as a Japanese crowd, that Mr. Fink has assured us. In the Teatreda, Paris and In the last decade of the last century, experiments were made with all the arts, except the art of the palette. Recently, Mary Halleck, a Philadelphia pianist, has invented a mixture of music, lights, and costumes. For instance, in a certain Debussy piece, the stage assumes a deep violet hue which

Starting point is 06:20:17 glides into a light purple. The Turkish march of Mozart is depicted in deep reds, yellows and greens. Philip Hale, the Boston music critic, has written learnedly on the relation of tones and colours, and that astonishing poet Arthur Rambo in his alchemy du verb tells us, I believe in all the enchantments, I invented the colour of the vowels. A. black, e white, I red, oh blue, you green. This scheme he set forth in his famous sonnet, Vuel, which was only a very, a mystification to catch the ears of credulous ones. Renada Gill invented an entirely new system of

Starting point is 06:21:02 prosody, which no one understood, least of all the poet. I wrote a story, The Piper of Dreams, in Melomaniacs, to prove that music and the violet rays combined might prove deadly in the hands of an anarcher composer like Ilovsky or Rehaj Strauss, and now New York has enjoyed its first light symphony by Alexander Scriabin. It was played by the Russian symphony orchestra under the suave conductorship of Modeste Altzschule, who is so Jacobian, while his brother Jacob, who is modest, sat at the keyboard and pressed down the keys which regulated the various tinctings on a screen. A wholly superfluous proceeding, as the colours did not mollify the truculence of the score.

Starting point is 06:21:51 Indeed were quite meaningless, though not operating. I admired this Russian Scriabin ever since I heard Yosef Hoffman play a piano of his etude in D-sharp minor. Chopin-esque vary, but a decided personality was also shown in it. I've heard few of his larger orchestral works. Nevertheless, I did not find Prometheus as difficult of comprehension as either Schoenberg or Ornstein, judged purely on the scheme set by its composer, I confess I enjoyed its chaotic beauties in passionate twaddle, and singular to relate, the music was best when it recalled Wagner and Chopin. A piano part occasionally sounded bilious premonitions of Chopin.

Starting point is 06:22:38 But, for such a mighty theme as Prometheus, the Lightbringer, a prehistoric Ben Franklin without his electrified kite, the leading motifs of this new music were often undersized. The dissociation of conventional keys was rigorously practiced, and at times we were in the profoundest gulfs of cacophony, but the scoring evoked many novel effects, principally Berliols and vodka. I still think Scria been a remarkable composer, if not much addicted to the languishing Lydian mode. But his light symphony proved to be only a partial solution of the problem.

Starting point is 06:23:19 In Paris, the poet Harencore and Ernest Eckstein, in the third, invented puppet shows with perfume symphonies. A quarter of a century ago, I visited the Theatardardard in Paris, that is, my astral soul did, for in those times I was a confirmed theosophist. The day had been a stupid one in Gotham, and I hadn't enough temperament to light a cigarette, so I simply pressed the non-brile button, took my Rig Veda, a sacred buggy, projected my astral being, and sailed through space to the French-Garact. capital, there to enjoy a bath in the new art, or synthesis of the seven arts, eating included.

Starting point is 06:24:01 As it was a first performance, even the police were deprived of their press tickets, and the deepest mystery was maintained by the experimenters. I found the theatre, soon after my arrival, plunged into an orange gloom, punctured by tiny balls of violet light, which daintily and intermittently blinked. The dominant odour of the atmosphere was Cologne-wold. with a florid counterpoint that recalled bacon and eggs, a malange that appealed to my nostrils. And, though at first it seems hardly possible that the two dissimilar odours could even be made to modulate and merge, yet I had not been indoors ten minutes before the subtlety of the duet was apparent.

Starting point is 06:24:44 Bacon has a delicious smell, and, like a freshly cut lemon, it causes a premonitory tickling of the palate, and little rills of hunger in one's stomach. Aha! I cried, astraly, of course. This is a concatenation of the senses, never dreamed of by Plato when he conceived the plan of his republic. The languid lisp of those assembled in the theatre drifted into little sighs,

Starting point is 06:25:10 and then a low, long, drawn-out chord in B-flat minor, scored for octaroons, octopuses, shofars, timpony, and piccolo sounded. immediately a chorus of male soprani blended with this chord, though they sang the common chord of A major. The effect was one of vividity. We say avidity, why can't we say vividity? It was a dissonance, pianissimo, and it jarred my ears in a way that made their drums warble. Then a low burbling sound ascended.

Starting point is 06:25:43 The bacon-frying, I cried, but I was mistaken. It was caused by the hissing of a sheet of chameleon. that is, carmine and vermilion, smoke, which slowly upraised on the stage. As it melted away, the lights in the auditorium turned green and topaz, and an odour of jasmine and stewed tomatoes encircled us. My immediate neighbours seemed to be swooning. They were nearly prostrate, with their lips glued to the rod that ran around the seats. I grasped it, and received a most delicious thrill,

Starting point is 06:26:16 probably electrical in origin, though it was velvety pleasure merely to touch it, and the palms of my hands exquisitely ached. The tactile motive, I said. As I touched the rod, I noted a small mouthpiece, and thinking I might hear something, I applied my ear. It instantly became wet. So evidently, it was not the use to which it should be put. Again inspecting this mouthpiece, I put my finger to it, and cautiously raised the moist end to my lips. "'Heavenly!' I murmured. "'What sort of an earthly paradise was I in?' And then, losing no time,

Starting point is 06:26:56 I placed my astral lips to the orifice, and took a long pool. Gorgeous was the result. Gumbo soup, as sure as I ever ate it, not your pusillanimous New York variety, but the genuine ochre soup that one can't find outside of Louisiana, where old Negro mammies used to make it to perfection. The soup motif, I exclaimed.

Starting point is 06:27:19 Just as I gurgled the gumbo nocturn down my thirsty throat, a shrill burst of brazen clangor, this is not tautological, in the orchestra roused me from my dream, and I gazed on the stage. The steam had cleared away, and now showed a rocky and wooded scene, the trees sky blue, the rocks are Nile green.

Starting point is 06:27:41 The band was playing something that sounded like a strabismic version of the prelude to Tristan. But strange odour harmonies disturbed my enjoyment of the music, for so subtly allied were the senses in this new temple of art that a separate smell, taste, touch, vision, or sound jarred the ensemble. This uncanny interfusion of the arts took my breath away, but, full of gumbo soup as I was, and you have no idea how soup dismodes the astral stomach, I was anchored to my seat,

Starting point is 06:28:13 and bravely determined not to leave till I had some clue to the riddle of the new Evangel of the Seven, or seventeen, arts. The stage remained bare, though the rocks, trees and shrubbery, changed their hues about every twenty seconds. At last, as a blazing colour hit my tired eyeballs, and when the odour had shifted to decayed fish, dried grapefruit and new-mown hay, I could stand it no longer, and, turning to my neighbour,

Starting point is 06:28:42 I tapped him on the shoulder, and politely asked, Monsieur, will you please tell me the title of this play, piece, drama, more so, Stu-ec, sonata, odour, picture, symphony, cooking comedy, or whatever they call it? The young man to whom I had appealed looked fearfully about him. I had foolishly forgotten that I was invisible in my astral shape. then clutched at his windpipe, beat his silly skull, and screamed aloud, "'Mondieu! Still another kind of oral pleasure!' And was carried out in a superbly vertiginous fit.

Starting point is 06:29:19 Fright had made him mad. The spectators were too absorbed, or drugged, to pay attention to the incident. Followed a slow, putrid silence. Realising the folly of addressing humans in my astral garb, I sat down in my corner and again watched the stage. Still no trace of actors. The scenery had faded into a dullish-dun hue, where the orchestra played a Bach fugue for oboe,

Starting point is 06:29:47 lamp-post, transposed to E-flat and two policemen, accordions in F, and stopped strumpets. Suddenly the lights were out, and we were plunged into a blackness that actually pinched the sight, so drear, void and dead was it. A smell of garlic made us cough, and by a sweep of some current we were saturated with the odors of white violets. The lights were tuned in three keys, yellow of eggs, marron glacé and orchids, and the soup supply shifted to whiskey-sour's. How delicate these contrasts! Hick-uped my neighbour, and I astraly acquiesced.

Starting point is 06:30:26 Then, at last, the stage became peopled by one person, a very tall old man with three eyes, heels and a deep voice. Brandishing aloft his whiskers, he curiously muttered, And hast thou slain the Jabberwok? Come to my arms, my beamish boy. Alice in Wonderland was the mystery play, and I had arrived too late to witness the slaying of the monster in its many buttoned waistcoat. How gallantly the beamish boy must have dealt the death-stroke to the queer brute, as the orchestra sounded the Zekefried and the dragon motifs, and the air all the while redolent with Heliotrude. I couldn't help wondering what the particular potage it was at this crucial moment. My cogitation was interrupted by the appearance of a gallant

Starting point is 06:31:14 appearing young knight in luminous armour, who dragged after him a huge carcass, half-dragon and two-thirds pig. The other three-thirds must have been suffering from stage fright. The orchestra proclaimed the apatouille, and instantly rose odours penetrated, penetrated the air, the electric shocks ceased, and subtle little kicks were administered to the audience, which, by this time, was well-nigh swooning with these composite pleasures. The scenery had begun to dance gravely to an odd Russian rhythm, and the young hero monotonously intoned a verse, making the vowel sound sizzle with his teeth, and almost swallowing the consonants.

Starting point is 06:31:58 And in an offish thought he stood, the Jabberwock, with eyes, of flame, came wiffling through the tully wood and burbled as it came. This beats Gertrude Stein, I thought, as the orchestra played the galamphing motif from the ride of the Valkyries, and the lights were transposed to a shivering purple. Then lilac steam ascended, the orchestra gasped in CD flat major for Coma de Bacetto and three yelping poodles, a smell of cigarettes and coffee permeated the atmosphere and I knew that this magical banquet of the senses was concluded. I was not sorry as every nerve was sore from the strain imposed. Talk about faculty of attention. When you are forced to taste, see, hear, touch and smell simultaneously, then you yearn for a less alambicated art. Synthesis of the

Starting point is 06:32:52 arts, synthesis of rubbish. One at a time, and not too much time at that. I pressed my astral button and flew homeward, wearily, slowly. I was full of soup and tone, and my ears and nostrils quivered from exhaustion. When I landed at the battery, it was exactly five o'clock. It had stopped snowing, and an angry sun was preparing to bathe for the night in the wet of the western sky. New Jersey was etched against the cold, hard background, and as an old hand-organ struck up it's a long, long way to retrograd, I threw my cap in the air and joined in. Astorily, but joyfully, the group of ragged children who danced around the venerable organists with jeers and shouting. After all, life is greater than the seven arts.

Starting point is 06:33:46 End of chapter 20. Chapter 21 of Unicorns. This is a Librevox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public. domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org. Unicorns by James Hunaker Chapter 21. The classic Chopin. That Chopin is a classic, need not be unduly insisted upon. He is classic in the sense of representing the best in musical literature, but that he is of a classical complexion as a composer from the beginning of his career may seem in the nature of a paradox. Nevertheless, it is a thesis that can be successfully maintained now, since old party lines have been effaced, to battle seriously for such words as classic or romantic or realism is no longer possible.

Starting point is 06:34:56 cultured Europe did so for a century, as it once wrangled over doctrinal points, as if the salvation of mankind, depended upon the respective verbal merits of transubstantiation, or consubstantiation. Only yesterday, that ugly word, degeneracy, thanks to quack critics and charlatan psychiatrists, figured as that means of esthetician. estimating genius. This method has quite vanished among reputable thinkers, though it has left behind it another misunderstood vocable decadence. Wagner is called decadent, so is Chopin, while Richard Strauss is held up as the prime exponent of musical decadence. What precisely is decadent? Says Havelock Ellis, technically a decadent style, is only such, in relation to a classic style. It is simply a further development of a classic style, a further specialization,

Starting point is 06:36:06 the homogeneous in Spencerian phraseology, having become heterogeneous. The first is beautiful because the parts are subordinated to the whole. The second is beautiful because the whole is subordinated to the parts. Swift's prose is classic. Pater's decadent, Roman architecture's classic, to become in its Byzantine developments, completely decadent, and St. Mark's is the perfected type of decadence in art. Pure early Gothic again is strictly classic in the highest degree because it shows an absolute

Starting point is 06:36:46 subordination of detail to the bold harmonies of structure, while the later Gothic is decadent. All art is the rising and falling of the slopes of a rhythmic curve between these two classic and decadent extremes. I make this quotation for it clearly sets forth a profound but not widely appreciated fact. In art, as in life, there is no absolute. Perhaps the most illuminating statement concerning the romantic style was uttered by Teufield-Gotier. of it he wrote in his essay on Baudelaire. Unlike the classic style, it admits shadow. We need not bother ourselves

Starting point is 06:37:32 about the spirit of romanticism that has been done to the death by hundreds of critics, and it is a sign of the times that the old-fashioned Chopin is fading while we are now vitally interested in him as a formalist. Indeed, Chopin, the romantic, poetic, patriotic sultry sensuous morbid and chopin the pianist need not enter into our present scheme he has appeared too popular fancy as everything from thadius of warsaw to an exotic growing-room hero from the sentimental consumptive consoled by countesses to the accredited slave of george saun all this is truly the romantic chopin it is the obverse of that

Starting point is 06:38:21 metal that peaks curiosity, why the classic quality of his compositions, their clarity, concision, purity, structural balance, were largely missed by so many of his contemporaries is a mystery. Because of his obviously romantic melodies, he was definitely ranged with the most extravagant of the romantics, with Berliot's, Schumann, List, but as a matter effect. He is formerly closer to Mendelssohn. His original manner of distributing his thematic material deceived the critics. He refused to join the revolutionists. Later in the case of Lobert, we come upon an analogous condition. Hale as chief of the realists, the author of Madame Bovary, took an ironic delight in publishing Salambo, which was romantic enough to please that

Starting point is 06:39:21 Prince of romanticists Victor Hugo. Chopin has been reproached for his tepid attitude toward romanticism, and also because of his rather caustic criticisms of certain leaders. He,

Starting point is 06:39:36 a musical aristocrat, pure song, held aloof, though he permitted himself to make some sharp commentaries on Schubert, Schumann, and Berlioz. Decidedly not a romantic, despite his romantic externalism.

Starting point is 06:39:55 Decidedly a classic, despite his romantic content. Of him, Stendell might have written, a classic is a dead romantic. Hina left no epic, yet he is an indubitable classic. Wise Gerdot said, the point is for a work to be thoroughly good, and then it is sure to be classical. But it is not because of the classicism. achieved by the pathos of distance that Chopin's special case makes an appeal.

Starting point is 06:40:28 It is Chopin as a consummate master of music that interests us in his admirable Chopin, the composer Edgar Stillman, Kelly, considers Chopin and puts out of court the familiar gifted amateur, improvisatory of genius, and the rest of the theatrical stock description by proving beyond peradventure of a doubt that Frédéric Francois Chopin was not only a creator of new harmonies, inventor of novel figuration, but also a musician skilled in the handling of formal problems, one grounded in the schools of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Furthermore, that if he did not employ the sonata form in its severest sense, he literally built on it as a foundation.

Starting point is 06:41:21 He managed the rondo with ease and grace, and if he did not write fugues it was because the fugue form did not attract him. Perhaps the divination of his own limitations is a further manifestation of his extraordinary genius. This does not imply that Chopin had any particular genius in counterpoint, but to deny his mastery of polyphony is a grave error, and it is still denied with the very evidence staring his critics in the face. Beethoven, in his sonatas,

Starting point is 06:41:59 demonstrated his individuality, though coming after Mozart's perfect specimens in that form. Chopin did not try to ban the bow of Ulysses, though more than a word might be said of his two last, sonatas. The first is boyishly pedantic and monotonous in key contrast, while the cello and piano sonata hardly can be ranked as an exemplar of classic form. Of the etudes, Kelly says, in this group of masterpieces, we find the more desirable features of the classical school, diatonic melodies, well-balanced phrase and period-building, together with the richness afforded

Starting point is 06:42:45 chromatic harmonies and modulatory devices heretofore unknown. Indeed, a new system of music that changed the entire current of the art. It was not without cause that I once called Chopin, the open door, through his door, the east, entered, and whether for good or for ill, certainly revolutionized Western music. Mr. Hadau is right in declaring that Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, are not as far from each other as the music of 1880 from that of 1914. And Chopin was the most potent influence in company with Beethoven and Wagner in bringing about that change. I say in company with Beethoven and Wagner, for I heartily agree with Friedrich Nix in his recent judgment, I consider Chopin to be one of the three most powerful factors in the development of 19th century music.

Starting point is 06:43:49 The other two being, of course, Beethoven and Wagner. The absolute originality of Chopin's personality and that of its expression through novel harmony, chromaticism, figuration, justifies the assertion. And none will deny the fact who takes the trouble to trace the Polish master's influence. on his contemporaries and successors. The greatest and most powerful composers came under this influence to a large extent by the process of infiltration.

Starting point is 06:44:23 Kelly gives us chapter and verse in the particular case of Wagner and his absorption of the harmonic schemes of Chopin, as did the late Anton Sidel, many times for my particular benefit. However, this only brings us to Chopin, the innovator, whereas it is the aspect of the classic Chopin, which has been neglected. As far back as 1840, Chopin was employing, half-tones with a freedom that brought upon him

Starting point is 06:44:52 the wrath of conservative critics, writes Hadal, who admires the pole with reservations, not placing him in such august company, as has Kelly and Neeks. True, Chopin was a pioneer in several departments of his art, yet, how few recognized or recognized today that Schumann is the more romantic composer of the pair. His music is a very jungle of romantic formlessness. His carnival, the epitome of romantic musical portraiture, with its Chopin, more Chopin than the original. Contrast the noble fantasy in C, Op. 17 of Schumann, with the equally Noble Fantasy in F minor

Starting point is 06:45:39 opus 49 of Chopin, and asked which is the more romantic in spirit structure and technique, unquestionably to Schumann would be awarded the quality of romanticism. He is more fantastic, though his fantasy is less decorative. He strays into the most delightful and unbrageous paths, and never falters in the preservation of romantic atmosphere. Now look on the other picture. There is Chopin, who, no matter, his potentialities, never experimented in the larger symphonic mold, and as fully imbued with the poetic spirit as Schumann. Nevertheless, a master of his patterns, whether in figuration or general structure.

Starting point is 06:46:25 His mer-zurkers are sonnets, and this ph-minor is, as Kelly points out, a highly complex rondo, as are the ballads and skirts soes. Beethoven, doubtless, would have developed the eloquent main theme. More significantly, strictly speaking, Chopin introduces so much new melodic material that the rondo form is greatly modified, yet never quite banished. The architectonics of the composition are more magnificent than in Schumann, although I do not propose to make invidious comparisons.

Starting point is 06:47:01 Both works are classics in the accepted sense of the term. But Chopin's fancy is more classic in structure and sentiment. The sonatas in B-flat minor and B-minor are awful examples for academic theorists. They are not faultless as to form and do sadly lack organic unity. Schumann particularly criticizes the Sonata Opus 35 because of the inclusion of the funeral march and the homophonic invertebrate finale. But the two first movements are distinct contributions to Sonata literature, even if in the first movement the opening theme is not recapitulated. I confess that I am glad it is not, though the solemn title Sonata becomes thereby a mockery.

Starting point is 06:47:52 The composer adequately treats this first motive in the development section so that the absence later is not annoyingly felt. There are, I agree with Mr. Kelly, some bold. that are surprisingly, like a certain page of Diagata Dameron, as the Fuer Zalber music may be noted in the flickering chromaticism of the E minor concerto, whereas the first phrase of the C minor aitude, Opus 10, number 12, is to be found in Tristan and Isold. Isold's opening measure, Vervatt, Mikzou, Hernin. The orchestra plays the identical Chopin phrase. This first movement of the B-flat minor sonata, with four bars of introduction, evidently suggested by the sublime opening of Beethoven C. Minor Sonata Opus 111 does not furnish us with as concrete an example as the succeeding scherzo in E-flat minor, for me, one of the most perfect examples of Chopin's exquisite formal sense. While it is not as long-breathed as the C-sharp minor Skeur, its concision makes it more tempting to the student, in character, stormier than the Skeurtso Opus 39, its thematic economy and development by close parallelism of phraseology, as Howdow points out, reveal not only a powerful creative impulse, but erudition of the highest order. No doubt Chopin did, improvise freely, did come easily by his melodies.

Starting point is 06:49:30 but the travail of a giant's impatience again you think of floubert is shown in the polishing of his periods he is a poet who wrote perfect pages the third skirts of less popular but of deeper in port than the one in b flat minor is in spirit sphenetic ironical and passionate yet with what antithetic precision and balance the various and antagonistic moods are grasped and portrayed and every measure is logically accounted for the automatism inherent in all passage work he almost eliminated and he spiritualized ornament and arabesque it is the triumph of art over temperament no one has ever accused chopin of lacking warmth indeed thanks to a total misconception of his music he is tortured into a roaring tornado by sentimentalists and virtuil but if he is carefully studied it will be seen that he is greatly preoccupied with form his own form be it understood and that the linear in nearly all of his compositions takes precedence over color i know this sounds heretical but while i do not yield an eye-oader in my belief that chopin is the most poetic among composers as shelley is among poets and vera mirror is the painter's painter it is high time that he be viewed from a different angle. The versatility of a man,

Starting point is 06:51:03 his genius as composer and pianists, the novelty of his figuration and form, dazzled his contemporaries, or else blinded them to his true import. Individual as are the six scherzoes, two of them are in the sonatas. They nevertheless stem from classic soil. The skerzo is not new with him,

Starting point is 06:51:25 nor are its rhythms, but the ballads are Chopinet, to the last degree with their embellished thematic condenses, modulatory motives, richly decorated harmonic designs, and their incomparable content, above all in their amplification of the coda, a striking extension of the postlude, making it as pregnant with meaning as the main themes. The lordly, flowing, narration of the G minor blog, the fantastic wavering outlines of the second blog, which on close examination exhibits the firm, Buren of a masterful etcher, the beloved third ballade, a formal masterpiece, and the F minor ballad, most elaborate and decorative of the set, are there, I asked in all piano literature, such original compositions. The four impromptuous are mood pictures, highly finished, not liking boldness of design, and in the second F-sharp major, there are fertile, figurative devices and rare harmonic treatment. The melodic organ point is original. Polyphonic complexity is to be found

Starting point is 06:52:32 in some of the mazurka's. Ellert mentions a perfect canon in the octave in one of them, C-sharp minor Opus 63. Of the concertos, there is less to be said, for the conventional form was imposed by the title. Here's Chopin is not the greater Chopin, notwithstanding the beautiful music for the solo instrument. The sonata form is not desperately evaded, and in the rondo of the E minor concerto, he overtops Hummel on his native heath. As to the instrumentation, I do not believe Chopin had much to do with it. It is the average colorless scoring of his day, nor do I believe with some of his admirers that he will bear transposition to the orchestra or even to the violin. It does not attenuate the power and originality of his themes that they are.

Starting point is 06:53:22 essentially of the piano. A song is for the voice and is not bettered by orchestral arrangement. The same may be said of the classic concertos of violin, with all due respect for those who talk about the Beethoven sonatas being orchestral. I only ask, why is it they sound so un-orchestral when scored for the full battery of instruments? The sonata pateti loses its character thus treated. So does the A-flat-Polyne. So does the A-flat-Polyne, of Chopin, heroic, as are its themes. Render unto the keyboard, that which is composed for it. The Apacianata Sonata, in its proper medium, is a thrilling, is the Eroica Symphony. The so-called orchestral test is no test at all, only a confusion of terms and of artistic

Starting point is 06:54:13 substances. Chopin thought for the piano. He is the greatest composer for the piano. By the piano he stands or falls. The theme of the theme of the piano. Chaupein thought for the piano, he is the greatest composer for the piano. By the piano, he Stanza Falls, the theme of the grandiose A minor, A2, Opus 25, number 11, is a perfect specimen of his invention. Yet it sounds elygiac and feminine when compared with the first tragic theme of Beethoven's C minor symphony. The Allegro de concert opus 46 is not his most distinguished work, truncated concerto as it is, but it proves that he could fill a larger canvas than the false. In the mazurkas and etudes he is closer to Bach than elsewhere. His early training under Elstner was sound and classical. But he is the real Chopin, when he goes his own way, a fiery poet,

Starting point is 06:55:01 a bold musician, but also refined tactful temperament, despising the facile of the exaggerated and bent upon achieving a harmonious synthesis, truly a classic composer in his solicitude for contour and chastity of style. The slithes. The slithes. Slav was tempered by the Golic stream, insatiable in his dreams, he fashioned them into shapes of enduring beauty. You would take from us the old Chopin, the greater Chopin, the dramatic impassioned poet, improvisatore. I hear some cry, not in the least, Chopin is Chopin. He sings even under the fingers of pedants, and today is butchered in the classroom to make a holiday for theorists. Nevertheless, he remains unique. Sometimes the whole in his work is subordinated

Starting point is 06:55:47 to the parts. Sometimes the parts are subordinated to the whole. The romantic shadows there, also the classic structure. Again, let me call your attention to the fact that if he had not juggled so mystifyingly with the sacrosanctonic and dominant had not distributed his thematic material in a different manner from the prescribed methods of the schools, it would have been cheerfully, even enthusiastically saluted by his generation. But then we should have lost the real Chopin. End of chapter 21. Chapter 22 of Unicorns.

Starting point is 06:56:31 This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Olivia. Unicorns by James Hunaker. Chapter 22. Little mirrors of sincerity.

Starting point is 06:56:51 Barney in the box office. First scene It is snowing on the strand Not an American actor is in sight Though voices are wafted occasionally From the bar of the Savoy Remember this is a play And the unusual is bound to happen

Starting point is 06:57:07 In front of the newly built Theatre of Arts, Shaw and Science Two figures stand as if gazing at the brilliantly lighted facade The doors are wide open A thin and bearded man sits smiling And talking to himself in the box office His whiskers are as sandy as his wit.

Starting point is 06:57:25 The pair outside regard him suspiciously. Both are tiny fellows. One clean-shaven, the other wearing elaborately arranged hair on his face. They are the two Maxes, Nordau and Bernbaum. Says Nordau, isn't that Bernard in the booking office? By Jove it is. Let's go in. Hasn't he a new play on?

Starting point is 06:57:46 I can't say I'm only a critic of the drama. No cynicism, Maxx. urges Nordau. They approach. In unanimous flakes, the snow falls. It is very cold. Cries Bernard on recognizing them. Aye there, Skip. Tonight, free list is suspended. I'm giving my annual feast in the cave of culture of the modern idols in one scene. No one may enter. Least of all you, Nordau, or you, sir critic. Why? What's up, George? Asks in a pleading mid-Victorian timber, little Maxie. Back to the woods, both of you, commands George, who has read both Mark Twain and Oliver Herford. Besides, he confidentially adds, you surely don't wish to go to a play in which

Starting point is 06:58:35 your old friends Ibsen and Nietzsche are to be on view. On view, both the author of Degeneration. Yes, visible on a short furlough from Shaol. For one night only, my benefit. Step up, ladies and gentlemen, a few seats left. The great. greatest show on earth. I'm in it. Lively, please. A mob rushes in. The two maxes fade into the snow, but in the eyes of one there is a malicious glitter. I'm no maxi, he murmurs, if I can't get into a theater without paying. Nordau doesn't heed him. They part. The night closes in, and only the musical rattle of bangles on a naughty wrist is heard. Second scene. On the stage of the theater, there are two long tables.

Starting point is 06:59:22 The scene is set as if for a banquet. The curtain is down. Some men walk about conversing. Some calmly, some feverishly. Some are sitting. The light is feeble. However, may be discerned familiar figures. Victor Hugo, solemnly speaking to Charles Baudelaire,

Starting point is 06:59:41 who shivers, a novue frichon. Flaubert is in a corner roaring at St. Boeve. The old row over Salambo is on again. Richard Strauss is pulling at the velvet coat tails of Ricard Wagner without attracting his attention. The master, in company with nearly all the others, is staring at a large clock against the backdrop. Listen for the parseval chimes, he says, delight playing over his rugged features. Ape of the ideal, booms a deep voice hard by.

Starting point is 07:00:14 It is that of Nietzsche whose mustaches droop in Polish cavalier style. Batushka. If those two Dutchmen quarrel over the virility of Parsifal, I am going away. The speaker is Tolstoy, attired in his newest umudgic costume, top boots and all. In his left hand, he holds a spade. To the table, gentlemen! It is the jolly voice of the Irish Ibsen, GBS.S. Lights flare up.

Starting point is 07:00:41 Without is heard the brumming of the audience. An orchestra softly plays motives from Pellius and Melisanda. Wagner wipes his spectacles. and Maurice Matterlink crushes a block of Belgian oaths between his powerful teeth. But Debussy doesn't appear to notice either man. He languidly

Starting point is 07:01:00 strikes his soup spoon on a silver salt cellar and immediately jots down musical notation. The correspondence of nuances, he sings to his neighbor, who happens to be Whistler. Correspondence of fudge, retorts James, you think I'm interested in wallpaper music? Oh, Lil Luberlo?

Starting point is 07:01:18 all are now seated. With his accustomed lingual dexterity, Mr. Shaw says grace, calling down a blessing upon the paper-machet fowls and the pink stage tea from what he describes as a gaseous invertebrate god, he has read Heckel, and winds up with a few brilliant, heartless remarks. I wish you gentlemen, ghosts, idols, gods, and demigods, alive or dead, to remember that you are assembled here this evening to honor me. Without me and my books and my plays, you would all of you, be dead in earnest, dead literature as well as dead bones.

Starting point is 07:01:57 As for the living, I'll have a shy at you someday. I'm not fond of Matterlink. Here, here, comes from Debussy's mystic beard. As for you, Maurice, I can beat you hands down at bettering Shakespeare and for Ricard Strauss. Well, I've never tried orchestration, but I'm sure I'd succeed as well as you. you. Oh, please, won't someone give me a roast beef sandwich? In Russia, I daren't eat meat on the count of my disciples there, and in England? It is Tolstoy who speaks. Shaw fixes him with an indignant look. He, the prince of vegetarians. Give him some salt. He needs salting. In tears, Tolstoy resumes his reading of the confessions of Heismans. The band on the other side of the

Starting point is 07:02:46 curtain swings into the Kaiser March. Stop them! Stop them! screams Wagner. I'm a social democrat now. I wrote that march when I was a monarchist. This was the chance for Nietzsche. Drawing up his tall, lanky figure, he began, You mean, Herr Geyer, I give you your real name. You wrote it for money.

Starting point is 07:03:10 You mean, Richard Geyer, that you cut your musical coat to suit your snobbish clothes. You mean the Wagner you never were. that you wrote your various operas, which you call music dramas, to flatter your various patrons. Parciful for the decadent King Ludwig. Pardon?

Starting point is 07:03:33 This is too much. Manet's blonde beard wagged with rage. Have we assembled this night to fight over ancient treacheries, or are we met to do honor to the only man in England, and an Irishman, Assad, who in his place has kept alive the ideas of Ibsen, Nietzsche Wagner, as for me, I don't need such booming. I'm a modest man, I'm a painter. Ha, you a painter. Sitting alone, Jerome discloses spiteful intonations in his voice.

Starting point is 07:04:08 Yes, a painter, hotly replies many. And I am since the luf, my Olympa, all the worse for the lorv, sneers. Jerome. The two men would have been at each other's throats if someone from the land of the Midnight Whiskers hadn't intervened. It was Henrik Ibsen. Children, he remarks in a strong Norwegian brogue, please, to remember my dignity, if not your own. Long before Max Sterner, Nietzsche interrupted. There never was such a person. Ibsen calmly continues, I wrote that my truth is the truth. And when I see such so-called great man acting like children,

Starting point is 07:04:52 I regret having left my cool tomb in Norway. But where are the English dramatists our confrars? Ask the manner of the revels, Ibsen sat down. Shaw pops in his head at a practicable door. Who calls? We wish to know why our brethren the English playwrights are not bidden to meet us. said Matterlink, after gravely bowing to Ibsen, smiling beatifically, St. Bernard replied,

Starting point is 07:05:20 Because there ain't no such thing as an English dramatist. The only English dramatist is Irish. He disappears. Insues a lively argument. He may be right, exclaims Matterlink. Yet I seem to have heard of Penero, Henry Arthur Jones, Barry. Well, I'll have to ask the trusty ABCZ, Walkley.

Starting point is 07:05:44 And the Americans, cries Ibsen, who is annoyed because Ricard Strauss persists in asking for a symphonic scenario of Piergint. I'm sure, the composer complains. Grieg will be forgotten if I write new incidental music for you. Ibsen looks at him sourly. American dramatists? Do you mean American millionaires? Mane interpolated.

Starting point is 07:06:08 No, I fancy he means the American painters. who imitate my pictures, making them better than the original and also getting better prices than I did. What envy, what slandering, what envious feelings, sighs Nietzsche, if my doctrine of the eternal recurrence of all things sublunary is a reality, then I shall be sitting with these venomous spiders, shall be in this identical spot, a trillion years of hence. Oh, horrors, why was I born? Divided tones, argues Meney, clutching Whistler by his Carmelian necktie, are the only...

Starting point is 07:06:51 Suddenly, Shaw leaps on the stage. Gentlemen, ghosts, gods, idols, I have bad news for you. Max Nordau is in the audience. Nordau! wails everyone. Before the lights could be extinguished, the guests were under the table. No taking chances. Whispers Nietzsche, Kid talk, who is his Norda, a spy of Napoleon's?

Starting point is 07:07:16 Demands Hugo in bewildered accents. For answer, Bodilare shivers and intones, Oh, Po, Poe, oh Edgar Poe. Silence so profound that one hears the perspiration drop from Wagner's massive brow. Third scene. It still snows without. Max, the only Nordau,

Starting point is 07:07:39 stands in silent pride. He is alone. The erstwhile illuminated theatre is as dark as the hall of Ebless. Gone are the idols, all. I need but crack that old whip of decadence and they crumble. So much for a mere word. And now to work, I'll write the unique tale of Shaw's cave of idols, for I alone witnessed the denouement. He spoke aloud. Judge his chagrin when he heard the other Max give him this cheery leading motive. I saw it all. What a story for my weekly review. How like a yellow pear tree! exclaims the disgusted theorist of mad genius. Nordau speeds his way, as from the box office comes the chink of silver.

Starting point is 07:08:28 It is GBS counting the cash. Who says a poet can't be a pragmatist? The little Maxie calls out, Me too, Blarney. Remember, I'm the only living. replica of Charles Lamb. You mean dead mutton, tartly replied Bernard. The other giggled. The same dear old whimsical cactus, he cries, but with all your faults, we love you still. I said still, if that's possible for your tongue, George, quite still. Curtain. The woman who buys. She, entering art gallery. I wish to buy a tishen for my bridgewist this evening. Is it possible for you to send me

Starting point is 07:09:16 one to the hotel in time? He nervously elated. Impossible. I sent the last tishin we had in stock to Mrs. Grotes, Desjune Faroche. She, making a face. That woman again. Oh, dear.

Starting point is 07:09:28 How tiresome. He, eagerly, but I can give you a Raphael. She, dubiously. Raphael who? He, magisterially, there are three Raphael's, madame. The archangel of that name. Raphael Sanzio, the painter,

Starting point is 07:09:44 and Raphael Josephry. It is to the second one, I allude. Perhaps you would like to see, she hurriedly. Oh, not at all. I fancy it's all right. Send it up this afternoon, or hadn't I better take it along in my car? A shrill hurry-up hooting is heard without. It is the voice of the siren on a new 100-horsepower cubis machine, 19-18 pattern.

Starting point is 07:10:07 She, guiltily, Chin, that is my chauffeur, constant. The poor fellow, he's always so hungry about this time. By the way, Mr. Frame, how much do you ask for that, Raphael? My husband is so, yes, really stingy this winter. He says I buy too much. Forgetting, we're all beggars, anyhow. And what is the subject?

Starting point is 07:10:29 I want something cheerful for the game, you know. It consoles the kickers who lose to look at a pretty picture. He, joyfully, oh, the price, the subject. A half million is the price. Surely not too much. The picture is called the wooing of Eve. It has been engraved by Bartolozzi. Oh, it is a genuine Raphael.

Starting point is 07:10:50 There are no more imitation old masters. Only modern art is forged nowadays. She interrupting proudly. Bartolosi, the man who paints skinny women in Florence. Something like Boldini only in old-fashioned costumes? He, resignedly. No, madam. Perhaps you allude to Botticelli.

Starting point is 07:11:09 The Bartolosi, I mention, was a school friend of Raphael, or cousin to Michelangelo I've forgotten. which, that's why he engraved Raphael's paintings. He colors, as he recalls, conflicting dates. She, in a hurry, it doesn't matter, Mr. Fray, I hate all this affectation over a lot of musty-fusty pictures. Send it up with the bill. I ought to win at least half the money from Mrs. Stonerich. She rushes away. An odor of violets and stale cigarette smoke floats through the hallway. The siren screams and a rumbling is heard in the middle distance. He, waking as if, from a sweet dream vigorously shouts,

Starting point is 07:11:48 George, George, fetch down that canvas smear painted for us last summer, and stencil it Raphael Sanzio. Yes, Sanzio, S-A-N-Z-I-O. Got it? Hurry up, I'm off for the day. If anyone phones, I'm over at Sherry's in the cafe. Saunter's out, swinging his stick

Starting point is 07:12:06 and repeating the old Russian proverb, A Dark Forest is the heart of a woman. Schools in Art Yes, said the venerable auctioneer as he shook his white head. Yes, I watch them coming and going, coming and going. One year it's light pictures, another it's dark. The public is a woman. What fashion dictates to a woman she scrupulously follows.

Starting point is 07:12:32 She sports bonnets one decade, big picture hats the next. So the public loves art, or thinks it loves art. It used to be the Hudson River School. And then Chase and those landscape fellows came over from Europe, where they got a lot of newfangled notions. Do you remember Eastman Johnson? He was my man for years. Do you remember the fortuney craze?

Starting point is 07:12:53 His gamblers, some figures sitting on the grass? Well, sir, $17,000 that canvas fetched. Big price for 40-odd years ago. Bang up? Of course. Misonier, Bocero, and Delatal came in. Couldn't sell them fast enough. I guess the picture counterfeiters factories up on Monmart were kept busy those times.

Starting point is 07:13:14 times. It was after our civil war. There were a lot of mushroom millionaires who couldn't tell a chromo from a jerome. Those were the chaps we liked. I often began with $10,000. Who offers me $10,000 for this magnificent Munkanche? Nowadays, I couldn't give a Mankanjay away as a present. He's too black. Our people ask for flashing colors, rainbows, fireworks. The new school? Yes, I'm free to admit that the Barbizon men have had their day. Mind you, I don't claim they're falling off. A few seasons ago, a Trojan held its own against any money you could put up. But the 1830 chaps are scarcer in the market,

Starting point is 07:13:54 and the picture cranks are beginning to tire of dull grays, soft blues, and sober skies. The Barbazons drove out Messonnier and his crowd. Then Monet and the Impressionists sent the Barbazons to the wall. I tell you, the public is a woman. It craves novelty. What's that? Interested in the greater truth of post-impressionism? Huh, excuse me, my dear sir, but that's pure rot. Public doesn't give a hang for technique. It wants change.

Starting point is 07:14:21 Indeed, really? They've made a success, those young whippersnappers, the Cubists? Such cubs? Well, I'm not surprised. Perhaps our public is tiring of the academy. Perhaps young American painters may get their dues someday. We may even export them. I've been an art auctioneer man and boy over 50 years, and I tell you again, the public is a woman. One year it's dark paint, another it's light. Bonnets or hats, silks or satins, lean or stout. All right, coming, coming. Clearing his throat, the old auctioneer slowly moves away.

Starting point is 07:14:58 The joy of staring. Watch the mob. Watch it's staring. Like cattle behind the rails which bar a fat green field they pass at leisure, ruminating, or its equivalent, gum-chewing, passing masterpiece after masterpiece. only to let their gaze joyfully light upon some silly canvas depicting a thrice stupid anecdote. The socialists assure us that the herd is the ideal of the future. We must think, see, feel with the people, our brethren.

Starting point is 07:15:28 Mighty idea, but a stale one before Noah entered the ark. Let us go to the people, cried Tolstoy. But we are the people. How can we go to a place when we are already there? And the people surge before a picture. which represents an old woman kissing her cow or standing with eyeballs a gog they count the metal buttons on the coat of the messenier cuirassier it is great art let the public be educated down with the new realism which only recalls to us the bitterness and meanness of our mediocre existence are we not

Starting point is 07:16:03 all middle class how then can art be aristocratic why art at all give us the cinematograph pictures that act speaking records. Can vocally Caruso is worth a wilderness of Wagner Monkeys or self-playing unmusical machines or chromos. Therefore, let us joyfully stare. Instead of your step, watch the mob. A dilettante. He is a little old fellow with a slight glaze over the pupils of his eyes. He's never dressed in the height of the fashion, yet when he enters a gallery, salesman make an involuntary step in his direction. Then they get to cover as speedily as possible, grumbling. Look out, it's only that old bird again.

Starting point is 07:16:50 But one of them is always nailed. There is no escaping the barmecide. He thinks he knows more about etchings than Kennedy or Capelle, and when Montrose and Macbeth tell him of American art, he violently contradicts them. He is the embittered dilettante. Embittered, because with his moderate means he can never hope to own even the most insignificant of the treasures exposed under his eyes every day, week, and month

Starting point is 07:17:16 in the year. So he rails at the dealers, invades against the artists, and haunts auction rooms. He never bids, but is extremely solicitous about the purchases of other people. He has been known to sit for hours on a small print until, in despair, the owner leaves. Then, with infinite precautions our amateur arises, so contriving matters that his hard-won victory is not discovered by profane and prying eyes. Once at home, he gloats over his prize, showing it to a favored few. He bought it, he selected it, it is a tribute to his exquisite taste, and the listeners are beaten into dismayed silence by his vociferations, by his agile ape-like skippings and parrot ejaculations. With all, he is not a criminal, only a monomaniac of art.

Starting point is 07:18:10 He sometimes mistakes a whistler for a durer, but he puts the blame on his defective eyesight. The City of Brotherly Noise Philadelphia is the noisiest city in North America. If you walk about any of the narrow streets of this cold storage abode of brotherly love, you will soon see tottering on its legs the venerable New York joke concerning the cemetery-like stillness of the abode of brotherly love. Over there, the nerve shock is ultra-dynamic.

Starting point is 07:18:41 As for sleep, it is out of the question. Why, then, we'll ask the puzzled student of national life. Does the venerable witticism persist in living? The answer is that, in the United States, a truth promulgated a century ago never dies. We are a race of humorists. Noise-breeding trolley cars, constricted streets that vibrate with the clangor of loosely jointed machinery,

Starting point is 07:19:05 an army of carts and the cries of vegetable vendors, a multitude of jostling people making for the ferries on the Delaware or the bridges on the schoolkill rivers, together with the hum of vast manufactories, all these and a thousand other things placed New York in a more modest category. In reality, our own city emits few pipes in comparison with the city of brotherly noise, which sprawls over the map of Pennsylvania.

Starting point is 07:19:28 yet it is called dead and moss-grown. The antique joke flourishes the world over. In Philadelphia, it is stunned by the welter and crush of life and politics. Oscar Hammerstein first crossed the Rubicon of Market Street. The mountain of society was forced to go northward to this Muhammad of operatic music, Elsforgo Ricard Strauss, Debussy, Massenay, Mary Garden, and Oscar's famous head tile. What a feat to boast of! For hundreds of years Market Street had been the balking line of super nice Philadelphians. Above the delectable region north of the City Hall and Penn's statue was Samarian Darkness. Hammerstein, with his opera company, accomplished the miracle. Perfectly proper persons now say Gerard Avenue or Spring Garden without blushing because

Starting point is 07:20:18 of their increased knowledge of municipal topography. Society trooped northward. Motor cars from Rittenhouse Square were seen near Poplar Street. Philadelphia boasts a must some much superior culture in the crustacean line. The best fried oysters in the world are to be found there. Terrapin is the local god. And Dennis McGowan of Sansom Street hangs his banners on the outer walls. Within, red snapper soup and deviled crabs make the heart grow fonder. The difference in the handling of the social hammer between Philadelphia and New York, or Boston and Philadelphia, may be thus illustrated. At clubs in Philadelphia, they say,

Starting point is 07:20:58 Dabbs is going fast. Pity he drinks. Did you see the seven cocktails he got away with before dinner last night? In Boston, they say, Dabs is quite hopeless. This afternoon, he mixed up Botticelli with Bottuccini. Of course, after that.

Starting point is 07:21:14 Now in New York, we usually dismiss the case in this fashion. Dabs went smash this morning. The limit! serves the idiot right. He never would take proper tips. Here are certain social characteristics of three cities set forth by kindly disposed clubmen. As the Chinese say, an image maker never worships his idols. We prefer the Cambodian sage who remarked, In hell, it's bad form to harp on the heat.

Starting point is 07:21:43 The Socialist The Socialist is not always sociable, nor is there any reason why he should be. He usually brings into whatever company he frequents his little pail full of theories and dumps them willy-nilly on the carpet of conversation. He enacts the eternal farce of equality for all, justice for none. The mob, not the individual, is his chivaleth. Yet he is the first to resent any tap on his shoulder in the way of personal criticism. He has been in existence since the coral atoll was constructed by that tiny, busy, gregarious creature. and in the final cosmic flare-up, he will vanish in company with his fellow man.

Starting point is 07:22:25 He is nothing, if not collective. His books, written in his own tongue, are translated into every living language, except sound English, which is inimical to jargon. If his communal dreams could come true, he would charge his neighbor with cheating above his position. Being a reformer, the fire of envy burns brightly in his belly, a sinister conflagration akin to that of India's Swami Ram Dam. In the thick twilight of his reason, he vaguely wanders, reading every new book about socialism till his confusion grows apace and is thrice confounded, from ignorance to arrogance, is but a step.

Starting point is 07:23:05 At the rich table of life groaning with good things, he turns away, preferring to chew the dry cut of self-satisfaction. He would commit barmecide rather than surrender his theory of the unearned increment. He calls Shaw and Wells traitors because they see the humorous side of their doctrines and occasionally make mock of them. The varieties of lady socialists are too numerous to study. It may be said of them without fear of being polite, that females rush in where fools fear to tread. But then, the woman who hesitates usually gets married. The Critic Who Gossips He has a soul like a Persian rug.

Starting point is 07:23:48 Many colored are his ways, his speech. He delights in alliteration of colors and avails himself of it when he dips his pen into ink. He is fond of confusing the technical terms of the seven arts, writing that stuffing the ballot box is no greater crime than constipated harmonics. But what he doesn't know is that such expressions as gamut of colors, scales, harmonies, tonal values belong to the art of painting and not alone to music. He is fonder of anecdote and gossip than of history. But what's the use? You can't carve rotten wood. Our critic will quote for you with his gimlet eye of a specialist boring into your own. The story which was whispered to Anthony Trollope in 1857, please don't forget, if he would be so kind, it was the Uffizi Galleries, Florence, as to show him the way to the medical Venus. This is marvelous humor and worth a ton of critical comment, which, by Apollo, it be. But, as Baudelaire puts it, nations like families produce great men against their will, and our critic is produced, not made. In the realm of the blind, the cock-eyed is king. The critic is said to be the most necessary nuisance, after women,

Starting point is 07:25:05 in this movie world of ours. But all human beings are critics, aren't they? The Mock Psychiatrist. If for the dog the world is a smell, for the eagle a picture, for the politician a nubalung hoard, then for the psychiatrist, life is a huge throbbing nerve. He dislikes naturally the anti-vivisectionists, but enjoys the moral vivisection of his fellow creatures. It's a mad world for him, my masters. And if your ears taper at the top, beware. You have the morals of a fawn. Or if your arms be lengthy, you are reversioned to a prehistoric type. The only things that are never too long for our friend the expert of rare phobias are his bills, and the length of his notice in the newspapers.

Starting point is 07:25:55 If he agrees with Charles Lamb that Adam and Eve in Milton's Paradise behave too much like married people, he quickly resents any tracing of a religion to an instinct or a perception. He maintains that religious feeling is only a mode of reaction, and our conscience but a re-adjusting. dusting apparatus. His trump card is the abnormal case, and if he can catch a tripping musician, a poet, a painter, he is professionally happy. Homer nodded, Shakespeare plagiarized, Beethoven drank, Mozart liked his wife's sister, Chopin coughed, Turner was immoral, Wagner, a little, how come you so? Hooray, cracked souls in a Donnybrook fair of the emotions. The psychiatrist can diagnose anything from rum-thirsts.

Starting point is 07:26:42 to sudden death. Nevertheless, in his endeavor to assume the outward appearance of a veritable man of science, the psychiatrist reminds one of a hermit crab, as described in E.H. Banfield's confessions of a beachcomer. The disinterested spectator, remarks Professor Banfield, may smile at the vain, yet frantically anxious efforts of the hermit crab to coax his flabby rear into a shell, obviously a flattering misfit. But it is not a smiling matter to him. until he has exhausted a program of ingenious attitudes and comic contortions as the attempt to stow away a number eight tail and a number five shell abandoned. The mock psychiatrist is the hermit crab of psychology, and of the living he has never been

Starting point is 07:27:29 known to speak a word of praise. End of Chapter 22. Recording by Alivia Chapter 23 of Unicorns This is a Librevox recording. recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Alivia. Unicorns by James Hunaker, Chapter 23, The Reformation of George Moore, Part 1. Dear, naughty, George Moore, sad, bad, mad, has reformed. He tells us why in his book,

Starting point is 07:28:11 Valle, the English edition of which I was lucky enough to read, for the American edition is expurgated, nay, fumigated, as was the memoirs of my dead life by the same Celtic Casanova. Valle completes the trilogy, Hail and Farewell, Ave and Salve, being the titles of the proceeding two. In the first, Moore is sufficiently vitriolic, and in Salve he serves up George Russell, the poet and painter, better known as A.E, in a more sympathetic fashion. When Valli was announced several years ago as on the brink of completion, I was moved to write, I suppose when the final book appears it means that George Moore has put up the shutters of his soul, not to say his shop, but I have serious doubts. After reading valet, I still had them. Only death will end the streaming

Starting point is 07:29:03 confessions of this writer. He who lives by the pen shall perish by the pen. This latter sentence is not a quotation from the sacred books of any creed, merely the conviction of a slave, chain to the ink well. I said that Valet was expurgated for American consumption. Certainly. We are so averse to racy, forcible English in America, thanks to the mean narrow spirit in our arts and letters, that a hearty oath scares us into the Brooklyn backyard of our timid conscience. George calls a spade a spade, and he delights on stirring up rank, malodorous soil. with his war-worn agricultural implement.

Starting point is 07:29:43 When he returned some years ago to Dublin, there to help in the National Literary and Artistic Movement, he found a devoted band of brethren. William Butler Yates, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde, John M. Singh, Edward Martin, Russell, and others. I shan't attempt even a brief mention of the Neo-Celtic awakening. Yates was the prime instigator, also the Storm Center. He literally discovered Singh,

Starting point is 07:30:09 the dramatist. In reality, the only strong man of the group, the only dramatist of originality, and with his exquisite lyric gift, he also discovered a New Ireland, a fabulous, beautiful errand, unsuspected by Tom Moore, Samuel Lover, Carlton, Mangan, Lever, and the Too Busy Cal. As I soon found out when there, Dublin is a vast whispering gallery. Delightful, hospitable Dublin is also a provincial town, given to gossip, and backbiting. Say something about somebody in the smoking room of the shell-born, and a few hours later, the clubs will be repeating it. Mr. Moore said things every hour in the day, and in less than six days he had sown for himself a fine crop of

Starting point is 07:30:54 enemies. To get even, he conceived the idea of writing a series of novels with real people bearing their own names. That he hasn't been shot at, horsewipped, or sued for libel thus far, is just his usual good luck. Valle is largely a book. Valle is largely a book. of capricious insults. But then the facts, it sets down in cruel type. When the years have removed the actors therein from the earthly scene, our grandchildren will chuckle over Moore's unconscious humor and Pepys-like chronicling of small beer. For the social historian, this trilogy will prove a mine of gossip, rich, voracious gossip. It throws a calcium glare on the soul of the author, who, self-confessed, is now old and no longer a dangerous Don Juan.

Starting point is 07:31:39 In real life he was, as far as I can make out, not particularly a monster of iniquity, but, oh, in his confessions and memoirs, what a rake he was, how the lascivious loot did sound. Some of the pages of the new volume, in which he describes his tactics to avoid a kiss, kissing gives him a headache in these lonesome latter years, though he was only born in 1857, is to set you wondering over the frankness of the man. Walter Pater once called him, audacious George Moore, and audacious he is with pen and ink. Otherwise, like Bernard Shaw, he is not looking for physical quarrels. He once spoke of Shaw as the funny man in a boarding

Starting point is 07:32:21 house, though he never mentions his name in his memoirs. He doesn't like Yates. What's more, he prints the news as often and as elaborately as possible. In the present book, he doesn't exactly compare Yates to a crane or a pelican, but he calls attention to the fact that the poet belonged to the lower middle class. It seems that Yates had been thundering away at the artistic indifference of the Dublin bourgeoisie. Now, looking at Yates, the night when John Quinn gave him a dinner at Delmonico's, you could not note any resemblance to exotic birds, though he might recall a penguin. He was very solemn, very bored, very fatigued, his eyes deep sunken from fatigue. Posing as a tame parlor poet for six weeks had tired the man to his very bones. But catch him,

Starting point is 07:33:08 in private with his waistcoat unbuttoned, I speak figuratively, and you will enjoy a born raconteur, one who slowly distills witty poison at the tip of every anecdote, till, bursting with glee, you cry, how these literary men do love each other, how one Irishman dotes on another. Yates may be an exception to the rule that a poet is as vain and as irritable as a tenor. I didn't notice the irritability, finding him taking himself seriously, as should all apostles of culture and Celtic twilight. He got even with George Moore's virulent attacks by telling a capital story, which he confessed was invented, one that went all over Dublin and London. When George felt the call of a Protestant conversion, he was in Dublin. He has told us of his difficulties, mental and

Starting point is 07:33:56 temperamental. One day some question of dogma presented itself, and he hurried to the cathedral for advice. He sent in his name to the archbishop, and that forgetful dignitary exclaimed, more, more, oh, that man again, well, give him another pair of blankets. In later versions, coals, candles, and even shillings were added to the apocryphal anecdote, which, by the way, set smiling the usually impassive more, who can see a joke every now and then? Better still is the true tale of George, who boasts much in valet of his riding dangerous mounts, and when challenged at an English country house, did get on the back of a vicious animal and ride to the hounds the better part of the day. He wouldn't, quite properly, take the dare,

Starting point is 07:34:41 although when he reached his room, he found his boots full of blood. So there is sporting temper in him. Anyone reading his Esther Waters may note that he knows the racing stable by heart. In Valé, he describes his father's stable at Castlemore, County Mayo. Of course, this is not the time to attempt an estimate of his complete work, for who may say what fresh outbursts, what new imprudences in black and white we may expect. He has paid his respects to his fellow countrymen and is heartily despised by all camps, political, religious, artistic. He has belittled the work of Lady Gregory, Yates, and Edwin Martin, and has rather patronized John M. Singh, the latter, possibly, because Singh was discovered. By Yates, not more. Yet we do enjoy the vagaries of George Moore. I only saw

Starting point is 07:35:31 him once a long time ago, to be precise in 1901 at Beirut. He looked more like a bird than Yates, though his beak is not so predacious as Yates. A golden-crested bird, with a chin as diffident as a poached egg, and with melancholy, pale blue eyes, and an undecided gait. He talked to the Irish language as if it were the only redemption for poor unhappy Ireland. In Valé, there is not the same enthusiasm. He dwells with more delight on his early Parisian experiences, it is the best part of the book, and to my way of thinking, the essential George Moore is to be found only in Paris. London is an afterthought. The Paris of Manet, Monet, Monet, Wissler, Heisman, Zola, Verlaine, and all the new men of 1880, what an unexplored vein

Starting point is 07:36:21 he did work for the profit and delectation of the English-speaking world. True critical yeoman's work, for to preach Impressionism, 25 years ago in London, was to court Arumpas. What hard names were reigned upon the yellow head of George Moore, that color so admired by Manet and so wonderfully painted by him in the academic camp. He replied with all the vivacity of vocabulary, which your true Celt usually has on tap. He even went for the Pre-Refellites, a band of overrated mediocrities, on the pictorial side at least, though John Malay was a talent, and for years was a solitary prophet in a city of Philistines. The world caught up with more. and today the shoe pinches on the other foot.

Starting point is 07:37:04 It is George, who is a belated critic of the new art, most of it as stale as the Medes and Persians. And many are the wordy battles waged at the Café Royal, London, when Augustus John happens of an evening and finds the author of modern painting, denouncing Debussy in company with Matisse and other post-imitators. Manet, like more, is old hat. Vaux Chappot.

Starting point is 07:37:28 For modern youth, it is well to go to bed not too late, life, else some impertinent youngster may cry aloud, what's that venerable granddaddy doing up at this time of night? To each generation, it's critics. Part 2. In one of his fulminations against Christianity, Nietzsche said that the first and only Christian died on the cross.

Starting point is 07:37:50 George Moore thinks otherwise, at least he gives a novel version of the narrative in the synoptic gospels. The Brooke Carruth is a fiction dealing with the life of Christ. It is a book that will offend the faithful, and one that will not convince the heterodox. In it, George Moore sets forth his ideas concerning the Christ myth, evoking, as does Flaubert and Salambeau, a vanished land, a vanished civilization, and in a style that is artistically beautiful. Never has he written with such sustained power, intensity, and nobility of phrasing,

Starting point is 07:38:23 such finely-tempered modulated prose. It is a rhythmed prose which first peeped forth in some pages of Mr. Moore's. Evelyn Inns, when the theme bordered on the mystical, yet it is of an essentially Celtic character. Mysticism and more do not seem bedfellers. Nevertheless, Mr. Moore has been haunted from his first elaborate novel, A Drama in Muslin, by mystic and theological questions. A pagan by temperament, his soul is the soul of an Irish Roman Catholic. He can no more escape the fascinating ideas of faith and salvation than did Heismans. He has taken exception to this statement in an open letter. A realist from the beginning, he has leaned of late years heavily

Starting point is 07:39:06 on the side of the spirit. But like Baudelaire, Barbé d'Arvallé, Vierde de la Zael L'Ame, Paul Verlaine, and Hoismans, Mr. Moore is one of those sons of Mother Church who give anxious pause to his former co-religionists. The Brooke Carrath will prove a formidable rock of offense, and it may be said that it was on the index before it was written. And yet we find in it, George Moore among the prophets. Perhaps Mr. Moore has read the critical work of Professor Arthur

Starting point is 07:39:34 Drew's, The Christ Myth. It is a masterpiece of destruction. There are many books in which Jesus Christ figures. Ernest Renan's life, written in his silky and sophisticated style, is no more admired by Christians than the cruder study by Strauss.

Starting point is 07:39:50 After these, the deluge, ending with the dream by the late Remy de Gourmand, a Luxembourg. And there is the brilliant and poetic study of Edgar Saltus, his Mary Magdalene. Anatole France has distilled into his the revolt of the angels some of his acid hatred of all religions, with blasphemous and obscene notes not missing. It may be remembered that Monsieur France also wrote that pastel of irony, the procurator of Judea, in which Pontchus Pilate is shown in his old age, rich, unweed, sick. He is quite

Starting point is 07:40:24 forgotten when asked about the Jewish agitator who fancied himself the Son of God, and was given over to the temple authorities in Jerusalem, and crucified. Rising from the tomb on the third day, he became the Christ of the Christian dispensation, aided by the religious genius of one Paul, formerly known as Saul, the tentmaker of Tarsus. Now Mr. Moore does in a larger mold and in the grand manner what Anatol France accomplished in his miniature. The ironic method, a tragic irony, suffuses every page of the Brooke Carruth, and the story of the four Gospels is twisted into something perverse, and for Christians altogether shocking. It will be called blasphemous, but we must remember that our national

Starting point is 07:41:06 constitution makes no allowance for so-called blasphemers, that the mythologies of the Greeks and Romans, Jews and Christians, Mohammedans, and Mormons, may be criticized, yet the criticism is not inherently blasphemous. America is no more a Christian nation than a Jewish nation, or a nation of free thinkers. It is free to all race. and religions, and thus one man's spiritual meat, maybe another's emetic. Having cleared our mind of Kant, let us investigate the Brooke Carrath. The title is applied to a tiny community of Jewish mystics, the Essines, who lived near this stream, perhaps the scriptural Kedron.

Starting point is 07:41:42 This brotherhood had separated from the materialistic Pharisees and Sadducees, not approving of burnt sacrifices or temple worship. Furthermore, they practiced celibacy, Tillaskism, within their ranks, drove the minority away from the parent body to shift for themselves. A young shepherd, Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph, a carpenter in Galilee, and of Miriam, his mother, they have other sons, is a member of this community. But too much meditation on the prophecies of Daniel and the meeting with a wandering prophet, John the Baptist, the precursor of the long foretold Messiah, led him astray. Baptized in the waters of Jordan, Jesus becomes a theomaniac. He believes himself to be the son of God,

Starting point is 07:42:22 appointed by the heavenly father to save mankind, especially his fellow Jews. Filled with a fanatical fire, he leads away a dozen disciples, poor, ignorant fishermen. He also attracts the curiosity of Joseph, the only son of a rich merchant in Arimathea. Two-thirds of the novel are devoted to the psychology of this youthful philosopher, who, inducted into the wisdom of the Greek's office is, notwithstanding, a fervent Jew, a rigid upholder of the law and the prophets. The dialogues between father and son, rather regard to the word, call Aaron, hardly Syria. Joseph becomes interested in Jesus, follows him about, and the fatal day of

Starting point is 07:42:59 the crucifixion, he beseeches his friend, Pilate, to let him have the body of his lord for a worthy interment. Pilot Demiors, then accedes, Joseph, with the aid of the two holy women, Mary and Martha, places the corpse of the dead divinity in a sepulchre. If Joseph hadn't been killed by the zealots of Jerusalem, heated to this murder by the high priest, the title of the book might have been Joseph of Arimathea. He is easily the most viable figure. Jesus is too much of a god from the machine, but he serves the author for the development of his ingenious theory. Finding the Christ still alive, Joseph carries him secretly and after dark to the house of his father, hides him, and listens unmoved to the fantastic tales of a resurrection. But the spies of Caiaphas are everywhere. Jesus is in danger

Starting point is 07:43:45 of a second crucifixion, so Joseph takes him back to the Essines, where he resumes his old occupation, of herding sheep. Feeble in mind and body, he gradually wins back health and spiritual peace. He regrets his former arrogance and blasphemy and ascribes the aberration to the insidious temptings of the demon. It seems that in those troubled days, the cities and countryside were infested by madmen, messiahs, redeemers, preaching the speedy destruction of the world. For a period, Jesus called himself the son of God and threatened his fellow men with fire and the sword. Till he was five and fifty years, Jesus lived with his flocks. The idyllic pictures are in Mr. Moore's most charming vein, sober as befits the dignity of the theme. He has fashioned in undulating

Starting point is 07:44:30 prose, each paragraph a page long, which flows with some of the clarity and music of a style once derided by him, the style coulant of that master of harmonies, Cardinal Newman. He is a great landscape painter. Jesus is aging. He gives up his shepherds' crook to his successor, and contemplates a retreat where he may meditate the thrilling events of his youth. Then Paul of Tarsus intervenes. He is vigorously painted. A refugee from Jerusalem with Timothy lost somewhere in Galilee, he invades the Asinian monastery. Eloquent pages follow. Paul relates his adventures under the banner of Jesus Christ, a disputatious man full of the Lord, yet not making it any easier for his disciples. You catch a glimpse of Pauline Christianity, differing from the tender mess.

Starting point is 07:45:17 message of Jesus, that Jesus of whom Havillock Ellis wrote, Jesus found no successor. Over the stage of those gracious and radiant scenes swiftly fell a fireproof curtain, wrought of systematic theology and formal metaphysics, which even the divine flames of that wonderful personality were unable to melt. If this be the case, then Paul was, if not the founder, the foster father, of a new creed. A seer of epileptic visions,

Starting point is 07:45:46 Edgar Saltus has said of the sacred disease that all founders of religions have been epileptics. Paul, with the intractable temperament of a stubborn Pharisee, was softened by some Greek blood, yet as Renan wrote of Amiel. He speaks of sin, of salvation, of redemption and conversion, and other theological bric-a-brac, as if these things were realities. For Paul and those who followed him, they were and are realities, and from them is spun the web of our modern civilization. The dismay of Paul on learning from the lips of Jesus that he it was who, crucified, came back to life, may be fancy.

Starting point is 07:46:22 The sturdy apostle, who recalled the reproachful words of Jesus issuing from the blinding light on the road to Damascus, Paul, Paul, why persecuteest thou me? Naturally enough, denounced Jesus as a madman, but accepted his services as a guide to Cessaria, where, in the company with Timothy, he hoped to embark for Rome, there to spread the glad tidings, there to preach the gospel of Christ and him crucified. On the way, he cautiously extracts from Jesus, whose memory of his cruel tormentors is halting, parts of his story. He believes him a half-crazy fanatic, deluded with the notion that he is the original Jesus of Nazareth.

Starting point is 07:47:00 Jesus gently expounds his theories, though George Moore pulls the wires. A pantheism that ends in nirvana, naunt, nada, nothing, despairing of ever forcing the world to see the life. he has become a quietist, almost a Buddhist. He might have quoted the mystic Yocum Flora of the Third Kingdom, who said that the true ascetic counts nothing his own, save only his harp. Kaviri Monarchus as nihil reputat esi, sum nis catharum. When a man's cross becomes too heavy a burden to carry, then let him cast it away. Jesus cast his cross away, his spiritual

Starting point is 07:47:37 ambition, believing that too great love of God leads to propagation of the belief, then to hatred and persecution of them that won't believe. The Jews, says Jesus, are an intolerant, stiff-necked people. They love God, yet they hate men. Horrified at all this, Paul parts company with the son of man, secretly relieved to hear that he is not going, as he had contemplated, to give himself up to Hanan, the high priest in Jerusalem, to denounce the falseness of the heretical sect named after him. Paul, without crediting the story, saw in Jesus a dangerous rival. The last we hear of the divine shepherd is a rumor that he may join a roving band of East Indians and go to the source of all beliefs to Asia, impure, mysterious Asia, the mother of mystic cults. Paul too disappears,

Starting point is 07:48:24 and on the little coda, the rest of his story is unknown. We are fain to believe that the rest of his story is very well known in the wide world. The book is another milestone along Mr. Moore's road to Damascus. If, as Charles Baudelaire has said, superstitious, superstitious is the reservoir of all truths, then we have lost our spiritual bearings in the dark forest of modern rationalism. To be sure we have a Yankee Pope Joan, a Messiah in petticoats, who has uttered the illuminating phrase, My first and forever message is one and eternal, which is no more a parody of holy writ than the Brooke Carrath, a book which, while it must have given its author pains to write, so full of Talmudic and Oriental lore and the lore of the apocryphal gospels is it, must have

Starting point is 07:49:11 also a joy to him as a literary artist. The poignant irony of Paul's disbelief in the real Jesus is understandable, though it is bound to raise a chorus of protestations. But Mr. Moore never worried over abuse. He has, kelt that he is, followed his vision. In every man's heart there is a lake, he says, and the lake in his heart is a somber one, a very pool of incertitudes. One feels like quoting to him, though it would be unnecessary, as he knows well the quotation. but Barbary de Aravali once wrote to Baudelaire, and years later of Joris Karel Hoismans, that he would either blow out his brains or prostrate himself at the foot of the cross. Mr. Moore has in the past made his genuflections, but they were before the Jesus of his native

Starting point is 07:49:59 religion. The poetic, though not profound image he has created in his new book, will never seem the godlike man of whom Browning said in Saul, shall throw open the gates of new life to thee. see the Christ and stand end of chapter 23 read by olivia chapter 24 of unicorns this is a Libravox recording all Libravox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit Libravox.org recording by Olivia Unicorns by James Hunaker Chapter 24 Pillowland In his immortal essay on the flat swamp of convalescence, Charles Lamb speaks from personal experience of the king-like way, the sick man sways his pillow, tumbling and tossing and shifting and lowering

Starting point is 07:50:56 and thumping and flattening it, to the ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. He changes sides oftener than a politician. How true this is, even to the italicized word, I discovered for myself after a personal encounter with a malignant pneumococcus, backed up by his ally, the pleuracy. Such was the novelty of my first serious illness that it literally took my breath away. When I recovered my normal wind, I found myself monarch of all I surveyed. My kingdom abed, yet seemingly a land without limit. Who dares circumscribe the imagination of an invalid?

Starting point is 07:51:35 As to the truth of Mr. Lamb's remarks on the selfishness of the sick man, there can be no denial. His pillow is his throne. From it he issues his orders for the day, his bulletins for the night. The nurse is his prime minister, his right hand. With her moral alliance, he is unable to defy a host of officious advisors. But woe betide him if nurse and spouse plot against him. Then he is helpless. Then he is past saving. His little pet schemes are shattered in the making. He is shifted and mauled. He is prodded and found wanting. No hope for the helpless devil as his face. his hands made clean, his miserable tangled hair combed straight. In pillow land, what avatar? None, alas. Nevertheless, your pillow is your best friend. You're only confidant. In its cool, yielding depths,

Starting point is 07:52:24 you whisper. Yes, one is reduced to an evasive whisper, such as the cowardice superinduced by physical weakness. Bedpans are not for Bedouins. I'll have none of them. And then you swallow the next bitter pill the nurse offers. Suffering in obols, wrote Nietzsche. I suppose he's right, but in my case the nobility is yet to appear. Meek, terribly meek, sickness makes one. You suffer a sea change and without richness. The most annoying part of the business is that you were not consulted as to your choice of maladies. Worse remains.

Starting point is 07:53:00 You are not allowed to cure yourself. I loathe pneumonia, since I came to grips with the beast. The next time I'll go out of my way to select some exotic fever. Then my doctor will be vastly intrigued. I had a common or garden variety of lung trouble. Pooh, his eyes seemed to say. I read their meaning with the clairvoyance of the defeated. We shall have this fellow on his hind legs in a jiffy.

Starting point is 07:53:23 And I didn't want to get, well, too rapidly. Like St. Augustine, I felt like praying with a slight change of text. Give me chastity and constancy, but not yet. Give, I said to my doctor, health. But let me loaf a little longer. Time takes toll of eternity, and I've worked my pen and wagt. my tongue for twice 20 years. I need a rest. So do my readers. The divine rights of cabbages and kings are also shared by mere newspaper men. A litany of massive phrases followed, but in vain,

Starting point is 07:53:55 the doctor was inexorable. I had pneumonia. My temperature was tropical. My heart beat in a ragtime rhythm, and my pulse was out of the running. I realized as I tried to summon to my parched lips, my favorite red lattice oaths that, as Cabanis put it years ago, man is a digestive tube pierced at both ends. All the velvet vanities of life had vanished. I could no longer think in alliterative sentences. Only walking delegates of ideas filled my hollow skull like dried peas in a bladder. Finally, I concentrated, as the unchristian unscientists say, on the nurse, my nurse. As an old reporter of things theatrical, I had seen many plays with the trained nurse as heroin.

Starting point is 07:54:41 One and all I abhorred them, even the gentle and artistic impersonation of Margaret England in a piece whose name I have forgotten. I welcomed a novel by Edgar Saltus, in which the nurse is depicted as a monster of crime incarnate. How mistaken I have been! Now the trained nurse seems an angel without wings. She may not be the slender, dainty, blue-eyed,

Starting point is 07:55:01 flaxen-haired girl of the footlights. She's often mature and stout and a lover of potatoes. but she is a sister when a man is down. She is severe, but her severity hath good cause. At first, you feebly utter the word, nurse. Later, she is in the Irish royal family name. Follows Mary, and that way danger lies for the elderly invalid. When he calls her Marie, he is doomed.

Starting point is 07:55:28 Every day the newspapers tell us of marriages made in pillowland between the well-to-do widower, Mr. A. Sclerosis, and Miss Emma Mettick, of the St. Patronomero. hospital staff. Married sons and daughters may protest, but to no avail. A sentimental bachelor or widower in the lonesome latter years has an any more chance with a determined young nurse of the unfair sex than a snowbird in hell as Brother Mencken phrases it. However, every nurse has her day. She finally departs. Your eyes are wet. You're weeping over yourself. The nurse represented not only care for your precious carcass, but also a surcease from the demands of the world.

Starting point is 07:56:10 Her going means a return to work, and you hate to work if you are a convalescent of the true blue sort. Hence your tears. But you soon recover. You are free. The doctor has lost interest in your case. You throw physic to the dogs. You march at a lenten tempo about your embattled bed. You begin sudden little arguments with your wife, just to see if you haven't lost any of your old-time virility in the technique of household squabble.

Starting point is 07:56:35 you haven't. You swell with masculine satisfaction, and for at least five minutes you are the man of the house. A sudden twinge, a momentary giddiness, send you scurrying back to your bailiwick, the bedroom. And the familiar light motif is once more sounded, and with what humility of accent? Mama! The eternal masculine, the eternal child, you mumbled to her that it's nothing. As you recline on that thrice, a cursed couch, you endeavor to be haughty. But she knows you're simply a sick, grumpy old person of the male species, who needs to be ruled with a rod of iron, although the metal be well hidden. The first cautious peep from a window upon the world you left snow-white and find in vernal green is an experience almost worth the miseries you have so impatiently

Starting point is 07:57:21 endured. A veritable vacation for the eyes, you tell yourself, as the fauna and flora of flatbush break upon your enraptured gaze. Presently you watch with breathless interest the maneuvers of ruddy little Georgie in the next garden, as he manfully deploys a troop of childish contemporaries, his little sister doggedly traipsing at the rear. Sturdy Georgie has the makings of a leader. He may be a captain of commerce, a colonel, and master politician, but he will always be foremost, else nowhere. You are the audience. He imperiously bids his companions, and when rebellion seemed imminent, he punched, without a trace of anger, a boy much taller. I envy Georgie his abounding vitality. Fertively, I raised the window. Instantly, I was spied by Georgie, who cried lustily,

Starting point is 07:58:07 Little boy, little boy, come down and play with me. I almost felt gay. You come up here, I called out with one lung. I haven't a step-ladder, he promptly replied. The fifth floor is as remote without a ladder as age is separated from youth. Now I'm moralizing. On dismayed, Georgie continued to call, little boy, little boy, come down and play with me. The most disheartening thing about a first sickness is the friend who meets you and says, I never saw you look better in your life. It may be true, but he shouldn't have said it so crudely. You renounce thin and there the doctor with all his pumps of healing. You refuse to become a professional convalescent. You are cured, and once more a commonplace man, one of the healthy herd.

Starting point is 07:58:53 Notwithstanding, you feel secretly humiliated. You are no longer king of Pillowland. End of Chapter 24, read by Alivia Chapter 25 of Unicorns This is a Libravox recording All Libravox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org Unicorns by James Hunaker Cross currents in modern French literature

Starting point is 07:59:23 1 They order certain things better in France than elsewhere I mean such teasing and unsatisfactory forms of bookmaking known as inquiries, enquettes, which is not fair to translate into the lugubrious literalism, inquests, anthologies and books that masquerade as books, as Charles Lamb have it. Without a trace of pedantry or dogmatism, such works appear from time to time in Paris and are delightful reminders of the good breeding and suppleness of Gallic criticism. To turn to favor and prettiness, a dusty department of literature is no mean feat.

Starting point is 08:00:01 What precisely is the condition of French letters since Ketchum Mondes published his magisterial work on the French Poetic Movement from 1867 to 1900? Paris 1903. Nothing so exhaustive has appeared since, though a half-dozen inquiries, anthologies, and symposiums are in existence. The most comprehensive recently is Florian Parmentier's contemporary history of French letters from 1885 to 1914. The author is a poet, one of Lejeune, and an expert swimmer in the multifarious cross-currents

Starting point is 08:00:36 of the day. His book is a bird's eye view of the map of literary France as far as the beginning of the war. He is quite frank in his likes and dislikes, and always has his reasons for his major idolatries and minor detestations. As a corrective to his enthusiasm and hatreds, there are several new anthologies at hand which aides us to form our own opinion of the younger men's prose and verse. And finally, there is a significant inquiry of Emil Henriot,

Starting point is 08:01:05 A Quarede de Jeune-Jean, 1913, of which more a nun. Amm Florian Pormantier is a native of Valenciennes, a writer whose versatility and fecundity are noteworthy in a far-from barren literary epoch. He has, with the facility of a littered young Frenchman, tried his hand at every form. All themes, so they be human, are welcome to him, from art criticism to playwriting. He is seemingly fair to his colleagues. Perhaps they may not admit this, but the question may be answered in the affirmative. Is he a safe critical guide in the labyrinth of latter-day French letters?

Starting point is 08:01:43 He notes, with an unaccustomed sense of humor in a critical barometer, the tendency of youthful poets, prose penmen, and others to form schools, to create Seneckle to begin fighting before they have any defined ideal. It leads to a lot of noisy, explosive manifestos, declarations and challenges, most of them rather in the air, though it cannot be denied that these evolutions of gustly temperaments do clear that same air, murky with theories and traversed by an occasional flash of genius. After paying his respects to the daily Parisian press, which he belabours as vino, cynical and impure, our critic evokes a picture of the condition of literary men, not a reassuring one, Indeed, we wonder how young people can dream of embracing such a profession, with its heartaches, disappointments, inevitable poverty.

Starting point is 08:02:32 Unless these aspiring chaps have a private income, how do they contrive to live? The answer is, they don't live, unless they write twaddle for the grand old public, which must be tickled with fluff and flattery. You say to yourself, after all, Paris is not vastly different in this respect from benign New York. detective stories, melodrama, the glorification of the stale triangle in fiction and drama, the apotheosis of the Apache. What are all these but slight variants of the artistic pabulum furnished by our native merchants in mediocrity? Consoled, because your mental and emotional climate is not as inartistic as it is painted,

Starting point is 08:03:10 you return to Florian Vermonciere and his divigations. He has much to say. Some of it is not as tender as tripe, but none assaulted with absurdity. Then you make a discovery. There is in France a distinct class, the intellectuals, who control artistic opinion because of its superior claims, a class to which there is no analogy, either in England or in America. The French Academy is not particularly referred to just now. Poets, journalists, wealthy amateurs, bohemians, and professors, all may belong to it if they have the necessary credentials, brains, talent, enthusiasm.

Starting point is 08:03:47 It is the latter quality that floats out on the sea of speculation, many adventuring barks. Each sports the tiny pennant proclaiming its ideals. Each is steered by some dreamer of proud and possible dreams. But they float, do these frail boats, laden with visions and captained by noble ambitions, or another image, a long narrow street on either side houses of manifold styles, Fantastic or sensible, castellated or commonplace, Baroque, stately, turreted, spired, and lofty. These eclectic architectures reflect the souls of the dwellers within. The ivory tower is not missing, though a half-century ago it was more in evidence.

Starting point is 08:04:31 The church is there, though sadly dwarfed. France is still spiritually crippled and flying on one wing. This means previous to 1914, and a host of other strange and familiar houses that jacked the poet built. On the doors of each is a legend, it may be neosymbolism, neoclassicism, free verse, sincerism, intensism, spiritualists, floralism, or the school of grace, dramatism, and simultaneousism, imperialism, dynamism, futurism, regionalism, pluralism, serenism, vivintism, magism, totalism, subsequentism, argonauts, wolves, visionary, and, most discussed of all, unanimism, headed by that farie propagandist and poet,

Starting point is 08:05:20 Jules Romain. Now, every one of these cults in miniature has its following, its programs, sometimes its special reviews, monthly or weekly. They are the numerous progeny of the elder romantic, realistic, and symbolic schools, long dead and gathered to their fathers. Charles Baudelaire, from whose sonnet correspondence, the symbolists stated, Bodler, the precursor of so much modern, is today chiefly studied in his prose writings, critical and aesthetic. His little poems and prose are a breviary for the youths who are turning

Starting point is 08:05:53 out an amorphous prose, which they call free. Paul Verlens' influence is still marked, for he is a maker of de bushy-like music, moonlit, vaporish, intangible, subtle, and perverse. The very quintessence of poetry haunts the vague terrain of his verse, but his ideas, his morbidity, These are negligible, indeed, abhorred. The new schools, whether belonging to the extreme right or extreme left, are idealistic in their aim and practice, that or nothing. The brutalities of Zola and the naturalistic school, the frigid perfection and metallic impassibility of the panacean are over and done with. Cynical cinders no longer blind the eye of the ideal. There is a renaissance of sensibility.

Starting point is 08:06:42 The universe has become plurality. sentimental pantheism is in the air. Irony has ceased to be a potent weapon in the army of poets and prosaetters. It is replaced by an ardent love of humanity, by a socialism that weeps on the shoulder of one's neighbour, by a horror of egoism, whether masquerading is a philosophy such as Nietzsche or a poesy such as the banation, for these poetling's issues are cosmical. Coeval, with this revival of sentiment is a decided leaning towards religion, not the white soul of the Middle Ages, as Uismans would say, not the medieval curiosities of Hugo, Gautier, La Martine, but the carrying aloft of the banner of belief,

Starting point is 08:07:24 the opposition to sterile agnosticism by the burning tongues of the Holy Spirit. No de la Tante movement this returned to Roman Catholicism. The time came from many of these neophytes, when they had to choose at the crossroads, either or. The button molder was lying in wait for such a adolescent peer-gint, and, outraged and nauseated by the gross license of their day and hour, by the ostentation of evil instincts, they turned to the right, some, not all of them. The others no longer cry aloud their pagan admiration of the nymphs' flesh in the break,

Starting point is 08:08:02 of the seven deadly arts and their sister's sins. In a word, since 1905, a fresher, a more tonic air has been blowing across the house-tops of French art and literature. Science is too positive. Every monad has had its day. Pictorial impressionism is without skeleton. Mysticism is coming into fashion again. Only the youngsters wear theirs with a difference. Even the cubists are working for formal severity,

Starting point is 08:08:30 despite their geometrical fanaticism. Youth will have its fling and joys an isotanic garb, in flaring colors and those doors in the narrow streets called Perhaps. Do but prove the eternal need of the new and the astounding. Man cannot live on manna alone. He must, to keep from volplaining, to the infinite, go down and gnaw his daily bone. The forked human, fattished with the head fantastically carved, has underpinnings also, else's chamber of dreams might overflow into reality,

Starting point is 08:09:02 and then we should be converted into trice to angels, pin feathers, and all. What were the controlling factors in young French literature, up to the greatest marking date of modern history, 1914. The philosophy of Henri Bergstone is one. That philosophy, full of poetic impulsion, graceful phrasing, and charming invocations. A feminine, nervous, fleshless philosophy, though deriving, as it does, from an intellectual giant, Emil Boutreux. Maurice Perret is another name to conjure with. Once the incarnation of a philosophical and slightly cruel egoism,

Starting point is 08:09:40 Then the herald of regionalism, replacing the flinty determinism of ten, with the watchwords, patriotism, reverence for the dead, a reverence perilously near-ancaster worship. To prose master Barre went into the political arena, and became, notwithstanding his rather aggressive modernism, an idealistic reactionary. He is more subtle in his intellectual processes than his one-time master, Paul Bourget, from whom his psychology stemmed, and, if his patriotism occasionally becomes chauvinistic, his sincerity cannot be challenged. That sincerest form of insincerity, moral earnestness, so-called, has never been his.

Starting point is 08:10:22 He is no more a sower of sand on the bleak and barren shore of negation. Little wonder he is accepted as a vital teacher. Other names occur as generators of present schools. Stendhal, Malameh, George Rodenbach, Rambo, that stepfather of symbolism. Emil Verharan, who is truly an elemental and disquieting force. Paul Adam, Maternique, the late Remy de Gourmon, who contributed so much to contemporary thought in the making. Francis Jem.

Starting point is 08:10:58 Villiers de Lille Adam. Renard. Samin. St. George de Beaulier, Jules Lafog, and how many others, to be found in the pages of Vance Thompson's French portraits, which valuable study dates back to the middle of the roaring 90s. 2. When we are confronted by a litany of strange names, by the intricate polyphony of literary sects, and Seneca, the American lover of earlier French poets is bewildered, so swiftly does the whirligigig of time bring new talents. Already the generation of 1900 has jostled from their place the elders of a decade-preylder.

Starting point is 08:11:38 previous. You read of Paul Napoleon Roanard. Maurice Bobourke. Hans Reiner, a remarkable writer. André Gide, Charles Louis-Philippe of Paul Fort, Paul Clodell, André Suarez, Stefan Servant, Andres, Félez, Georges Lebesgue, George Pauci, whose 36 dramatic situations deserves an English garb. recall some of them as potent creators of values.

Starting point is 08:12:10 But if London, a few hours from Paris, only hears of these men through a few critical intermediaries, such as Arthur Simons, Edmund Goss, and other cultivated and cosmopolitan spirits, what may we not say of America, a week away from the scene of action? As a matter of fact, we are proud of our provincialism, and for those who create, as the jargon goes. That same provincialism is a windshield against the drafts of too tempting imitation. But for our criticism, there is no excuse. A critic will never be a Catholic critic of his native literature of art if he doesn't know the literatures and arts of other lands, paradoxal as this may sound. We like aesthetic curiosity. Because of our uncritical

Starting point is 08:12:54 parochialism, America is comparable to a cemetery of cliches. Nevertheless, those of us who went as far as the portraits by Vance Thompson and Amy Lowell must feel a trifle strange in the long, narrow street of Florian Permentier, with its alternations of Septuantrionel mists and the blazing blue sky of the midi. This critic, by the way, is a staunch upholder of the Gaul. He will have no admixture of Latin influence. He employs what has jocosely been called the woed argument. He goes back not to the early Britons, but the Celticism. He is a sturdy Kimmerist and believes not in literature's transalpine or Transperinian. He loads the pastiche, the purveyors of canned classics, the Chile rhetoricians who set too much door on conventional

Starting point is 08:13:42 learning. A frank, a northerner, on the originator of impulsionism is Florian Permanentier. In his auscultation of genius, the Piscology Morale de Poets, 1904, may be found the germs of his doctrine. This doctrine seems familiar enough now. as does the flux of Eraclitus and the becoming of Renan in the teachings of Berksson. Unanimism has had some influence. M. Florian Permontier does not admire this movement or its prophet, Jules Romain. Unanimism.

Starting point is 08:14:14 Ah. The puissant magic of the word for these budding poets and philosophers. It ought to warm the cockles of the heart of critics. Henri Ertz. Sebastian Virol. Pierre Jodon. Jacques Nairal. Fernand of Ivoire, Tancret Vizin, Strenz, Girodou, Mandin, Guillaume Apollinaire.

Starting point is 08:14:37 All workers in the vast inane dwellers on the threshold of the future. The past and present bearings of the Academy Goncourt are carefully indicated. Thus far nothing extraordinary has come from it. Bazaq is still the mighty one in fiction. Thus far the names of Anatol France, Paul Adam, the brothers Rosni, Piersny, a brilliant, versatile man still maintain their primacy. Thus far, among the essayists, Remy de Gaumont, Camille,

Starting point is 08:15:06 Matarling, Romant-Roland, J.H. Fabre, Jules Bois, now sojourning in America, and a thinker of verve and originality, and Henri Houssay, hold their own against the younger generation. In the theater, there are numerous and vexing tendencies, materling, loyally acknowledging his indebtedness

Starting point is 08:15:26 to gentle, Charles van L'erberg, create a spiritual drama and as disciples. But the theatre is the theatre and resists innovation. Ibsen, who at his day in Paris and Antoine of the Free Theatre, were accepted not because of their novelty, but in spite of it. They both were men of the theatre. There is a school of idealism, and there are Curelle, Battais, Portorich, Materlin, Trachieu, and Marie Lainénerue.

Starting point is 08:15:55 But the technique of the drama is immemieux. In the domain of philosophy and experimental science, we find Emil Boutreau, and such collective psychologists as Durkheim, Gustave Le Bon, and Gabriel Tard, names such as Binet, Ribaud, Michel Savigny, Alfred Fouye, and the eminent mathematician, Henri Poincere, who finally became skeptical of his favorite logic, philosophy and mathematics. This intellectual, Voltafeus, caused endless discussion. The truth is that intuition, the instinctive versus intellectualism, what William James called vicious intellectualism, is swaying the younger French thinkers and poets.

Starting point is 08:16:37 There is, if one is to judge by the anthologies, far too much of metaphysics in contemporary poetry. Poetry is in danger of suffocating in a misty mid-region of metaphysics. The vital impulse, intuitionism, and rhythmic flow of time in Berksson called the fancy of the poets. Naturally enough, literary dogmatism had prevailed too long in academic centres. Now it is the deliquescence of formal verse that is to be feared. Verlibr, which began with such initiators as that astonishing prodigy, Arthor Rambo, has run the gamut from esoteric illuminism to sonorous yopping,

Starting point is 08:17:17 from the terrace of the prairie. Have frogs' wings? We are tempted to ask, voices they have, but not bird-like voices. That fascinating philosopher and friend of Remy de Gaormont, who practically introduce him, must not be overlooked, for he had genuine influence. I refer to brilliant Jules Gautier, who evolved from Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the idea of his bovarism, which succinctly stated, is the instinct in mankind to appear other than it is, from the philosopher to the snob,

Starting point is 08:17:49 from the priest to the actor, from the Duchess to the prostitute. of the influence of politics upon art and literature, which happily are no cloistered virtues in France, we need not speak here. Am Florian Pormantier does so in an admirable and bulky book, of which we have only exposed the highlights. Since Jules Urette's Enquette's Onolution Literare, 1890,

Starting point is 08:18:13 followed by similar works of Vellet, Jean Muller, and Gaston Picard, 1913. We recall no such pamphlet as Emil Andriot mentioned, above. He put the questions, where are we? Where are we going? In Luton of Paris, June 1912, to a number of representative thinkers and poets, and reprinted between covers, their answers in 1913. The result is rather confusing. A cloud of contradictory witnesses are assembled, and what one affirms the other denies, there are no schools. Yes, there are groups. We are going to the devil headlong.

Starting point is 08:18:52 The sky is full of rainbows and the humming of harp celestial. Better the extravagances of the decayed romanticists than the debasing realism of the modern novel, cry the symbolists. A plague on all your houses, say the unanimists. One fierce wolf, Lou, admitted that at the banquets of his senac, he and his fellow poets always aid an effigy, the classic writers. Or was it at the symbolists? Does it much matter?

Starting point is 08:19:19 The gesture counts alone with these youthful fumists. As Le Comte de Lille had christened their predecessors, Bernan, in his waggish mood, persisted in spelling as symbolists, the symbolists, his own followers. Gong's would have been a better word. A ponder speaks of theists as those who love Le Bon Dieu and Tea. The new critical school, at its head Sean Moura, do not conceal their contempt for all these arrivists and revolutionary groups, believing that only a classic renaissance will save young,

Starting point is 08:19:52 France. Barnum's, the entire lot. pronounces in faded accents the ultra-academic group. Three critics of wide-reaching influence are dead since the war began. Emil Fagier, Jules Le Maitre, and Remy de Gaumont. They leave no successors worthy of their metal. The three volumes of anthology of French contemporary poets from 1866 to 1916 have been supplemented by a fourth entitled Poets of Yesterday and Today. 1916. Edited by the painstaking M.G. Walsch, it comprises the verse of poets born as late as 1886.

Starting point is 08:20:31 Among the rest is the gifted Charles Dumas, who fell in battle 1914. As epigraph to the new collection, the editor had used a line from this poet's testament, So Desire d'Etrue t'etre My Man. Another anthology of the new poets is prefaced by M. Gustave Lanson. But the Waltz collection reveals more promising talents, or else the poet's. poems are more representative. Signor Marinetti, who is bilingual, is eccentrically amusing. But are his contortions on the tripod art?

Starting point is 08:21:02 The auto and aeroplane are celebrated, also steam, speed, mist, and the destruction of all art prior to 1900. The new schools are wary of rhetoric, thus following Paul Vernon's injunction. Take eloquence by the neck and ring it. Images abound, but there in an aristocratic minority. The watchword is, sobriety in thinking and expression. Strangely enough, two names emerged victoriously from the confusing lyric symphony, and there are those of Belgian-born poets, Emil Verreuren, whose tragic death last year was a lost to literature,

Starting point is 08:21:39 and Maurice Matarlinge. What living lyric poet has the incomparable power of that epical Verharen, unless it be that of the more sophisticated Gabrielle Dononziou, or the sumptuous decorative verse of Henri de Rignet, whose polished art is the antithesis of the exuberant, lawless resonant reverberations of Verrhearn. What thinker and dramatist is known like Mathieuink, except it be the magical Gerard-Aptmann. Rough to brutality, for Verne at one time emulated Walt Whitman, variously spelled as Wolfe and Whitman. With the names of foreigners, Paris has ever been careless in his orthography, Witness Litts and Edgar Poe. He can boast the divine.

Starting point is 08:22:22 divine athlatus. His personality is of the centrifugal order. He is a tumultuous rhythmic undertow that sweeps one irresistibly with him. But his genius is disintegrating, rather than constructive. Of what French poet among the younger group dare we say the same? Grace, lyric, sweetness, subtlety and ideas, facile technique. All these, yes, but not the power of saying great things greatly. As for Matarming, he owes something to Emerson, but But his mellow wisdom and clairvoyance are his own. He is a seer, and his crepuscular pages are pools of glimmering incertitudes, whereas of Verharne, we may say, as Carlisle said, of Landor's prose, the sound of it is like the ring of

Starting point is 08:23:06 Roman swords on the helmets of barbarians. Henry James tells a story of an argument between Zola Flaubert and Turgenev, the Russian novelist declaring that for him Chateaubriand was not the ultimatul of prose perfection. insensibility to the finer nuances of the language angered and astounded Zola and Flaubert, they set it down to the fact that none but a Frenchman can quite penetrate the inner sanctuary of his own language, which may be true, though I believe that for Turgenev, the author of Atala, was temperamentally distasteful. Therefore, when an American makes the statement that the two Belgians are superior to the

Starting point is 08:23:45 living Frenchmen, it may be classed as a purely personal judgment, but the proposition first mooted by a distinguished critic, Remy de Gourmetre Linc and Vérardin be elected to the French Academy, was not a bizarre one. The war has effaced many artistic frontiers. The majority of the little circles that once pululated in Paris no longer exist. Both Vergeren and Matarlinge are now Frenchmen of the French. Their inclusion in the Academy would have honoured that venerable and two August body, as much as the Belgian poets. As to the war's influence on French letters, That question is for soothsayers to decide. Not for the present writer.

Starting point is 08:24:25 After 1870, certain psychiatrists pretended that a degeneration of body and soul had blighted artistic and literary Europe. Well, we can only wish for the new France of 1920 and later such a galaxy of talent and genius as the shining groups from 1875 to 1914. No need to finger the chaplet of their names and achievements. Such books as those by Ketjoumondees, Florian Pormontier, Lansom and Walsh prove our contention End of Chapter 25 Chapter 26 of Unicorns This is a Libravox recording

Starting point is 08:25:03 All Libravox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer Please visit Libravox.org Unicorns by James Hanaker Chapter 26, more about Richard Wagner Time was when a fame-craving young man could earn a reputation for originality by merely going to the marketplace and loudly proclaiming his disbelief in a deity. It would seem that modern critics of Richard Wagner, busily engaged in placing the life of the composer under their microscopes,

Starting point is 08:25:36 are seeking the laurels of the ambitious chap aforesaid. Never has the music of Wagner been more popular than now. His name on the opera billboards is bound to crowd a house, and never, paradoxly as it may sound, has there been such a critical hue and cry over his works and personality the publication of his autobiography has much to do with this renewal of interest there is some praise much abuse to be found in the newly published books on the subject european critics are building up little islands of theory coral like some with fantastic lagoons others founded on stern truth and many doomed to be washed away overnight nevertheless the true richard wagner is beginning to emerge from the haze of Nibelheim behind which he contrived to hide his real self. Wagner, the gigantic comedian. Wagner, the egotist.

Starting point is 08:26:31 Wagner, the victim of a tragic love. Wagner, tone poet, mock philosopher, and a wonderful apparition in the world of art till success overtook him. Then Wagner became bored, with no more worlds to conquer, deserted by his best friends, whom he had alienated, without the solace of the men he had most loved, the man who had helped him over the thorny path of his life, List, Nietzsche, Von Bulo, Otto Wessendonk,

Starting point is 08:26:58 and how many others, even King Ludwig II, whom he had treated with characteristic in gratitude. No, Richard Wagner, during the sterile years, so-called from 1866 to 1883, was not a contented man. Despite his union with Cosima von Buello List and the foundation of a home and family at Baruth. One.

Starting point is 08:27:21 However, there are exceptions. One is the book of Otto Bornot entitled Ludwig Geyer, the stepfather of Richard Wagner. I wrote about it in 1913 for the New York Times. In this slender volume of only 72 pages, the author shifts all the evidence in the Geyer-Vagner question, and he has delved into archives, into the newspapers of Geyer's days,

Starting point is 08:27:46 and has had access to hitherto untouched material. It must be admitted that his conclusions are not to be lightly denied. August Bottinger's necrology has until recently been the chief source of facts in the career of Geyer, but Wagner's autobiography, which in spots Bernat corrects, and the life of Wagner by Mary Burrell, not to mention other books, have furnished Bernat with new weapons. The Geyers, as far back as 1700 were simple, pious folk, the first of the family being a certain Benjamin Geyer, who, about 1700, was a trombone player and organist.

Starting point is 08:28:25 Indeed, the chief occupation of many Geyers was in some way or other, connected with the evangelical church. Ludwig Heinrich Christian Geyer was a portraitist of no mean merit, an actor of considerable power, his friends Moore was a favorite role with the public, a dramatist of fair ability. He wrote a tragedy among others named the slaughter of the innocence

Starting point is 08:28:48 and also a verse maker. His acquaintance with Weber stimulated his interest in music. Weber discovered his voice and he sang in opera. Truly a versatile man who displayed in miniature all the qualities of Wagner.

Starting point is 08:29:02 The latter was too young at the time of Geyer's death, September 1821, to have profited much by the precepts of his stepfather. But his example certainly did prove stimulating to the imagination of the budding poet and composer. Geyer, Mary, Joanna Wagner, Bertz, Mary Burrell was the first to give the correct spelling of her maiden name.

Starting point is 08:29:24 The widow of the police functionary Wagner, to whose memory Richard pays such cynical homage in his obituary, August 14, 1814. She had about 261,000 and eight children. A ninth came later in the person of Sassil, who, afterward, married a member of the Avenarius family. Cecile, or Sicily, was a prime favorite with Richard. Seven years passed, and again Fraul Geyer found herself a widow, with nine children and little money. How the family all tumbled up in the world, owing much to the courage, wit, vivacity,

Starting point is 08:29:59 and unshaken willpower of their mother may be found in the autobiography. Bernard admits that Geyer and his wife may have carried to the grave certain secrets. Richard Wagner, until he was nine years old, was known as Richard Geyer, and on page 13 of his book our author prints the following significant sentence, quote, The possibility of Wagner's descent from Geyer contains in itself nothing detrimental to our judgment of the artwork of Barreuth, unquote. In 1900, a 20-page pamphlet bearing the title Richard Wagner in Zurich was published in Leipzig. It was signed Hans Bell Art and gave for the first.

Starting point is 08:30:39 first time to a much mystified world, the story of Wagner's passion for Matilda Wessendant, thus shattering beyond hope of repair, our cherished belief that Cosima von Bulow List had been the lodestone of Wagner's desire, that to her influence was due to the creation of Tristan and Isolda, its composer's high watermark and poetic, dramatic music. Now, Bellart, not content with his iconoclastic pamphlet, has just set forth a fat book which he calls Richard Wagner's love tragedy with Matilda Wessendunk. We had thought that the last word in the matter had been said when Beirut, Queen Cosimo I, allowed the publication of Wagner's diaries and love letters to Matilda,

Starting point is 08:31:20 though her complete correspondence is as yet unpublished, but Bellard is one of the busiest among the German critical choral builders. He has dug into musty newspapers and letters, and gives, at the close of his work, a long list of authorities. Yet nothing startling new comes out of his. researches. We knew that Matilda Wessendonk was the first love of Wagner, a genuine and noble passion, not his usual self-seeking for laundering. We also know that Otto Wessendon behaved like a patient husband and a gentleman. Any other man would have put a bullet in the body

Starting point is 08:31:56 that thrice impertinent genius knew too that Tristan and his older was born of this romance. But there is a mass of fresh details, petty backstairs gossip. All the tittle-tattle believe loved of such writers that, in company with Julius Kapp's Wagner, Undy Freyruy makes Belzart's new book a valuable one for reference. Cap, who has written a life of France list, goes Bellart one better, and hinting that the infatuated couple transformed their idealism into realism. Bellart does not believe this. Neither does Emil Ludwig, the latest critical commentator on Wagner.

Starting point is 08:32:34 But neither critic gives the profoundest proof that the love of Richard and Matilda was an exalted platonic one, that is the proof physiologic. I firmly believe that if Matilda Westendonk had eloped with Wagner in 1858, as he begged her to do, Tristan and Isolda might not have been finished. At all events, the third act would not have been what it is now. A mighty longing is better for the birth of great art than facile happiness. For the first time in his selfish, unhappy life, Wagner realized Gertes' words of wisdom. Renounce thou shalt. Shout, renounce. It was a bitter sacrifice, but out of its bitterness sweetness came the honey and moonlight of Tristan and Isolta. Wagner suffered, Matilda suffered,

Starting point is 08:33:23 Otto Wessendock suffered, and last, but not least, men of Wagner, the poor pawn in his married game, suffered to distraction. Let us begin with a quotation on the last page by three of Bell Arts book, quote, remarked Otto Wessendonk to a friend, I have hunted Wagner from my threshold, unquote. This was in August 1858. Wagner first met the Wessendonks about 1852, three years after he had fled to Zurich from Dresden because of his participation in the uprising of 1849, Wagner as amateur revolutionist. Thanks to the request of his wife, Matilda, Otto Wessendonk furnished a little house on the hill near his splendid villa for the Wagner's. First christened Fafner repose, Wagner changed the title to the aisle,

Starting point is 08:34:14 and for time it was truly an asylum for this perturbed spirit. But he must needs fall deeply in love with his charming and beautiful neighbor, a woman of intellectual and poetic gifts, and to the chagrin of her husband and of Wagner's faithful wife. The gossip in the neighborhood was considerable, for the complete frankness of the infatuated ones was not the least curious part of the affair lits knew of it so did the princess lane widgeenstein an immense amount of snooping was indulged in by interested lady friends of menna wagner she has her apologists and judging from the letters she wrote at the time and afterward several printed for the first time by nap and bellard she took a lively hand in the general proceedings evidently she was tired of her good man and when he solemnly assured her that it was the master passion of his life, she didn't believe him.

Starting point is 08:35:08 Naturally not. He had cried wolf too often. Besides, Mena, like a practical person, viewed the possibility of a rupture with Otto Wessendon as a distinct misfortune. Otto had not only advanced much money to Richard, but he paid 12,000 francs for the scores of Rhinelde and Volcker and for the complete performing rights. Afterward, he sent both to King Ludwig Viz. the second as a gift, but I doubt if he ever got a penny from his tenants for rent. He also defrayed the expenses of the Wagner concert at Zurich, a little item of 9,000 francs. Scandal non-Colombie invaded his home, the fair fame of his wife was threatened. No wonder the finale, long deferred, was stormy, even operatic.

Starting point is 08:35:53 The lady was much younger than her husband. She was born at the close of 1828, therefore Wagner's junior by 15 years. She was a Luke Meyer, her mother of Stein, a cultured sweet-natured woman. It is more than doubtful if she could have endured Wagner as a husband. She did a wise thing and resisting his prayers. Not only was her husband a bar to such a proceeding, but her children would have always prevented her thinking of a legal separation. All sorts of plans were in the air.

Starting point is 08:36:23 When, in 1857 the American panic seriously threatened the prosperity of Otto Wessendon, who had heavy business interest in New York, gossip averred that Frow Wessendonk would ask for a divorce, but the air cleared and matters resumed their old aspect. Menno Wagner's health, always poor, became worse. It was a case of exasperated nerves made worse by drugs. She daily made scenes at home and threatened to tell what she knew. That she knew much is evident from her correspondence with Frow Wilk. She said that Wagner had two hearts, but while he delighted,

Starting point is 08:36:58 in intellectual and emotional friendship with such a superior soul as Matilda, he nevertheless would not forego the domestic comforts provided by Menna. Like many another genius, Wagner was bourgeois. Those intolerable dogs, the parrot, the coffee drinking, the soft beds and solicitude about his underclothing, all were truly German, human, all too human. In September, 1857, the newly married von Bulose paid the Wagner's a visit, and as the guest chamber of the cottage was occupied, they took out temporary quarters in and in, the raven, Wotan's ravens, Cozima, young, impressionable, turned her face to the wall and

Starting point is 08:37:38 wept, when Wagner played and sang for his friends the first and second acts of Siegfried. Even then she felt the pull of his magnetism, of his genius, and doubtless regretted having married the fussy irritable von Buello, who had gone down in the social scale in wedding a girl of dubious descent. In Paris, List for many years was only a strolling gypsy piano player to whom the Countess de Gaulle had condescended. Matilda Wessendon entertained the Von Boulos, who went away pleased with their reception, above all, deeply impressed by the exiled Wagner. They so reported to Liszt, and von Buello did more. As the scion of an old aristocratic family, he made many attempts to secure an amnesty for Wagner, as well as making propaganda for his music,

Starting point is 08:38:26 which favors Wagner, who was the very genius of ingratitude repaid later. In one point, Air Ludwig is absolutely correct. The composer was supported by his friends from 1849 to the year when King Ludwig intervened. The starvation talk was a part of the Wagner legend. Even the Paris days were greatly exaggerated as to their black poverty. Wagner was always a spinthrift. From November 1857 to May 1858, Wagner set to music the five poems of Matilda, veritable sketches for Tristan. Early in September 1857, the relations between Minna and Matilda had become strained. Wagner accused his wife of abusing Matilda in a vulgar manner. Worse remained, he had sent a letter by the gardener to Frauessendonk, and the jealous wife

Starting point is 08:39:18 intercepted it, broke the seal, read the contents. To Wagner, this was the blackest of crimes. Yet can you blame her? To be sure, she had no conception of her husband's genius, for her Rinesy was his only work. Had it not succeeded, so had Tannenhauser and Lohengrin, also the Flying Dutchman, but Rensy was her, darling. How often she begged him to write another opera of the same Vognarian caliber. He has not failed to tell us. Otto Wessendonk's wife, she firmly believed, was leading him into a

Starting point is 08:39:52 quagmire. What theater could ever produce the ring? One thing, however, Mena did not do. As most writers on this subject say she did, she did not show the fatal letter to Wessendonk at the time, only to Wagner. Later, she made its meaning

Starting point is 08:40:08 clear to the injured husband, which no doubt provoke the explosively phrase quoted above. The youth The truthful Carl Tossig, bearing credentials from List, appeared on the scene in May 1858, and the entire household was soon in an uproar. Luckily, Wagner had persuaded Mena to take a cold water cure at a sanatorium some distance from Zurich, so he could handle the wild-eyed Tossack, whose volcanic piano performances at the age of 16, made the mature composer both wonder and admire.

Starting point is 08:40:40 Tossack smoked black cigars, a trait he imitated from List, and almost lived on coffee. Here is a curious criticism of him made by Cosima von Bulow, who it must be remembered was both the daughter and wife, a famous pianist. She said, quote,

Starting point is 08:40:57 Tosik has no touch, no individuality, he is a caricature of lits, unquote. This, in the light of Tossack's subsequent artistic career, sounds almost comical. It also shows the intensely one-sided temperament of a remarkable woman who banished from her life

Starting point is 08:41:14 both von Buehle and her father, Franz Liszt, when Wagner entered into her dreams. The fortitude she displayed after her Richard's death in 1883 was not tempered by any human feeling toward her father. His telegrams were unanswered. She denied herself to him. She became a brunhild frozen into a symbol of intolerable grief. Of her personal fascination, the sister of Nietzsche, Elizabeth Forrester Nietzsche told me, when I last saw her at Weimar, Von Bulow succumbed to this charm. Rubenstein also, Query, perhaps that is the reason he so savagely abused Wagner in his conversations on music? And if gossip doesn't die, Nietzsche was another victim. On September 17, 1858, after a general row, Wagner left his home on the Green Hill, his aisle, forever.

Starting point is 08:42:07 Why? Plenty of conjectures. statements. He makes a great show of frankness in his diaries in his autobiography, but they were obviously edited by Barreuth. Tristan and Azolder remains as evidence that a mighty emotion had transfigured the nature of a genius, and, instead of an erotic anecdote, the world of art is richer in the possession of a moving drama of desire and woe and tragedy. At the Berlin premiere of Tristan, the old Kaiser Wilhelm remarked, how Wagner must have loved when he wrote the work, which is sound psychology.

Starting point is 08:42:43 Three, the two books discussed are constructive in nature. Not so the book of Emil Ludwig, Wagner, or The Disenchanted, which is frankly destructive. Since the Wagner case by Nietzsche and not Nietzsche at his best, there has not been written a book so overflowing with hatred for Wagner, the man, as well as the musician. Ludwig is the author of poems, plays, and a study of Bismarck. The latter, a noteworthy achievement. He is thorough in his attacks, though he does not measure up to Ernest Newman in his analysis of Wagner's poetry, libretti, and philosophy. The English critic studies remain the best of its kind, because it is written without part of free.

Starting point is 08:43:26 Ludvick slash Alanici, though he cannot boast that poet's Diamantine style. He accuses Wagner of being paroximal, erotic, a painter of moods. He couldn't build a Greek temple like Beethoven, weak as a poet, inconclusive as a musician. For Tristan and a meister singer, he has words of hearty praise. The Ludwig book stirred up a nest of hornets and one lawsuit if resulted. A newspaper critic presumed to criticize and the sensitive poet, who called Wagner every bad name in the Schmiff lexicon, invoked the aid of the law. We know only too well, thanks to that ill-tasting but engrossing autobiography,

Starting point is 08:44:05 that Wagner was a monster of ingratitude. Hasn't Nietzsche, against his own natural feeling, proclaimed the futility of gratitude? Perhaps he learned this lesson from his heart experience with Wagner. We also know that Wagner wanted to run the universe, but after a brief note from Ludwig II, he left Munich rather than face the angry burgers. He attempted to coerce Bismarck,

Starting point is 08:44:29 but there he ran up against a wall of granite. Bismarck was a Beethoven lover, and he abhorred at as did von Boss, revolutionists. Thereat, Wagner wrote sarcastic things about the uselessness

Starting point is 08:44:42 and vanity of statesmen. He didn't treat Ludwig II right when he announced from Venice that he wasn't insufficient health and spirits to grant the king's request for a performance of the Prelude Langeren in a darkened theater with one listener, Ludwig II.

Starting point is 08:44:58 By the way, Ludwig II never sat through a performance alone of Parcival. Once and once only, years before the completion of the work, he heard a performance of the prelude in Munich given for his sole benefit. Wagner's graph letter wounded the sensitive idealist. In 1866, a few weeks after the death of Minna Wagner-Planter,

Starting point is 08:45:19 Cosima von Bulow List followed Wagner to Switzerland. Probably the hostile attitude of this in the affair was largely inspired by the fact that when Richard and Cosima married, the latter abjured Catholicism and became a Protestant. Litz, a religious man, despite his pyrotechnical virtuosity in the luxurious region of sentiment, never could reconcile himself to this defection on the part of a beloved child. It angered Nietzsche to discover in Wagner a leaning toward mysticism, toward religion, witnessed the muck-dock mysticism and burlesque of religious ritual in Parsifal. After Frowerbach came, Arder Schopenauer, in the intellectual life of Wagner.

Starting point is 08:45:59 This was in 1854. His friend Willie lent him the book. Immediately he started to Chopinour eyes the ring, thereby making a hopeless muddle of situation and character. The enormous vitality of Wagner's temperament expressed itself in essentially optimistic terms. He was not a pessimist, and he hopelessly misunderstood his new master. Wotan must needs become a Chopinaurian

Starting point is 08:46:26 and Siegfried a pessimist at the close. Nietzsche was right. Chopinauer proved a powerful poison for Wagner, and Chopinauer himself laughed at Wagner's music. He remained true to Rossini and Mozart and advised Wagner, through a friend, to stick to the theater and hang his music on a nail in the wall. But when his library was overhauled,

Starting point is 08:46:47 several margininalia were discovered, one which he contemptuously wrote on a verse of Wagner's, Ear, Ear! Where are your ears, musician? Wagner, when List abjured him to turn, to religion as a consolation replied, I believe only in mankind. Ludwig compares this declaration with some of the latter opinions concerning Christianity, of which Wagner has said many

Starting point is 08:47:10 evil things. Wagner's life was a series of concessions to the inevitable. He modified his art theories as he grew older, and with fame and riches, his character deteriorated. He couldn't stand success. He, the bravest man of his day, the undaunted fighter for an idea crook the need to cast. It became an amateur mystic and announced his intention of returning to absolute music,

Starting point is 08:47:35 of writing a symphony strict in form, which for his reputation he luckily did not attempt. He was a colossal actor and the best self-advisor the world has yet known since narrow. But I can't understand, Air Ludwig, when he asserts that from 1866 to 1883, the composer did nothing but composed two marches, finished Siegfried and Gauterdammerung, rather large order, considering the labors of the man as practical opera conductor, prose writer, poet dramatist, and composer,

Starting point is 08:48:09 and then, too, the gigantic scheme of Bear Ruth was realized in 1876. Comparatively Baron would be a fairer phrase, after Tristan and his older, what could any man compose? A work which its creator rightfully said was a miracle, couldn't understand. After the anecdotage of Wagner's career is forgotten, after Barrowuth has has become Alhunted, Tristan and his older will be listened to by men and women who love or have and loved. It is a pleasant to read a book like Ludvig's truthful as it may be in parts, nor should he call our attention to the posthumous venom of the composer as expressed in his

Starting point is 08:48:48 hateful remarks concerning Otto Wessendonk. There, Wagner was his own meme, his own Albrecht, not the knightly hero who would not woo the fair Irish maid till magic did melt his will. Richard Wagner was once, Tristan. End of Chapter 26 Chapter 27 of Unicorns This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.

Starting point is 08:49:29 org Unicorns by James Hunaker Chapter 27 My first musical adventure Music mad I arrived in Paris during the last weeks of the World's Fair of 1878 impelled there by a parching desire to see Franz's list if not to hear him He was then honorary director of the Austro-Hungarian section, but I could not find him,

Starting point is 08:50:05 although I heard of him everywhere, of musical fets, and the usual glittering company that had always surrounded this extraordinary son of fortune. One day I fancied I saw him. I was sadly walking the Rue de Rivoli of an October afternoon, when in a passing carriage I saw an old chap with bushy white hair, his face full of expressive warts, and in his mouth a long black cigar which he was furiously puffing. Lest! I gasped and started in pursuit.

Starting point is 08:50:43 It was not an easy job to keep up with the carriage. At last, because of a blocked procession, I caught up and took a long stare, the object of which, composedly smiled at me, but did not truly convince me that he was Franz List. You see, there were so many different pictures of him, even the warts, were not always the same in number. When I am in the Cambyses vein, I swear I've seen List, perhaps I did. Litsch or no Litz, my ambition was fired, net the advice of Frederick Boscovitz, a pupil of Liss, a pupil of List, and cousin of Raphael Josephi, I went to the Conservatoire Nacional, with a letter of introduction to the acting secretary, Emil Rétis. I was told that I was too old to enter, being a few months past 18.

Starting point is 08:51:43 I was disappointed and voiced my woes to Lucy Hamilton Hooper, then a clever writer and correspondent of several American newspapers. Her husband was Vice-Consul Robert Hooper, and he kindly introduced me to General Fairchild, the consul, and after a cross-examination, I was given a letter in which the United States government testified to my good social standing. I was not a banded, nor yet an absconder from justice, and extreme youth. Armed with this formidable document, I again besieged the gates of the great French Conservatoire, whose tuition it must be remembered is free. I was successful, inasmuch as I was permitted to present myself

Starting point is 08:52:37 at the yearly examination which took place November 13, ominous date. To say that I studied hard and shook in my boots is a literal statement. I lived at the time in an alley-like street, of the boulevard de Batignon, and lived luxuriously on five dollars a week, eating one satisfying meal a day with a hot bowl of coffee in the morning, and practicing on a wretched little cottage piano, as long as my neighbors would stand the noise.

Starting point is 08:53:14 They chucked boots or any old faggot they could find at my door, and after twelve hours I was so tired of patrolling the keyboard that I was glad to stop. Then a pillow on my stomach to keep down the pangs of a youthfully gorgeous appetite, I would lie in bed till dinner time. Oh, Chopin! Oh, consummate!

Starting point is 08:53:38 And boiled beef. Oh, sour blue wine at six cents the liter. At last the fatal day dawned, as the novelists say, it was nasty, chilling, foggy, autumnal, but my long locks hung negligently, and my velvetine coat was worn defiantly open to the wind. I reached the Conservatoire, then in the old building on the Rue de Fulburg-Roswigny, at precisely nine o'clock of the morn. I was put in a large room, with an indiscriminate lot of candidates,

Starting point is 08:54:15 some of them so young as to be fit for the care of a nurse. Like lost sheep, we huddled, and as my eyes feverishly rambled, I noticed a lad of about twelve, with curling hair, worn, artist fashion, a naughty, haughty boy he was, for he sneered at my lengthy legs and audibly inquired. His grandpa to play with us. I knew enough friends to hate that little monster, with a nervous hatred. There was a tight and feeling about my throat and heart, and I waited in an agitated spirit for my number. A bearded and shy young man came in from examination, and was at once mocked by the incipient virtuoso in pantalettes, another unfortunate with a role of music. Then the little devil was summoned. We sat up. In ten

Starting point is 08:55:13 minutes he returned with downcastmean, flushed face, tears in his eyes, and tried to sneak out of the room, but too late. After shaking hands all round, we solemnly danced in a circle about the now sobbing and no longer sinister child. Who says youth is ever generous? Number 13, sang out a voice, and I was pushed through a narrow entry, and a minute later was standing on the historic stage of the Paris Conservatoire. The lighting was dim, but I I discerned a group of persons somewhere in front of me. A man asked me to sit down at the grand piano, of course, like most pianos, out of tune,

Starting point is 08:56:00 and I tremblingly obeyed his polite request. At this juncture, a woman's voice inquired, How old are you, monsieur, I told her. A feminine laugh rippled through the gloom, for I wore a fluffy little beard, was undeniably gawky and looked conspicuously older than my years.

Starting point is 08:56:23 That laugh settled me. Queer, creepy feelings, seized my legs, my eyes were full of solar spectrums, my throat a furnace, and my heart beat like a triphammer. I was not the first man, young or old, to be knocked out

Starting point is 08:56:41 by a woman's laugh. Later I met the lady. She was Madame Massa. and the wife of the well-known violin master Masar of the conservatoire. Again, the demand plays something. It was a foregone conclusion that I couldn't. I began a minuetto from a Beethoven sonata, hesitated, saw fiery snakes and a kaleidoscope of comets,

Starting point is 08:57:06 then pitched into a presto by the unfortunate Beethoven, and was soon stopped. A sheet of manuscript was placed before me, I could have sworn that it was upside down. So as a sight-reading test, it was a failure. I was altogether a distinguished failure, and with the audible comment of the examining faculty ringing in my ears, I stumbled across the stage into welcome darkness,

Starting point is 08:57:35 and without waiting to thank Secretary Reti for his amiability, I got away, crossing in a hurry that celebrated courtyard, in which the hideous noises made by many instruments, including the human voice reminded me of a torture circle in Dante's inferno. The United States had no reason to be proud of her musical or unmusical son, that dull day in November 1878. When I arrived in my garret, I swore I was through and seriously thought of studying the xylophone. But my mood of profound discouragement was succeeded by a more hopeful one. If you can't enter the Paris Conservatoire as an active student, you may have influence enough to become an auditor, a listener, and a listener I became, and in the class of Professor Georges, a genuine pupil of Chopin.

Starting point is 08:58:34 My musical readers will understand my good luck. From that spiritual master, I learned many things about the Polish composer, heard from his still. supple fingers, much music as Chopin had interpreted it. Delicate and discriminating in style, Monsieur Matilla had never developed into a brilliant concert pianist. Sometimes he produced effects on the keyboard that sounded like emotional porcelain falling from a high shelf, a melodiously shattering on velvet mirrors.

Starting point is 08:59:09 He also taught me that if a pianist or violinist or singer is too nervous before the public than he or she has not a musical vocation. The case of Adolf Hensselt, to the contrary, notwithstanding, but better would it be for me to admit that I failed because I didn't will earnestly enough to succeed. End of Chapter 27. Chapter 28 of Unicorns. This is the Libravox recording.

Starting point is 08:59:48 recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librovogs.org. Unicorns by James Hunaker, Chapter 28. Violinists, now and yesteryear. With the hair of the horse and the entrails of the cat, magicians of the four strings weave their potent spells. What other instrument devised by the hand of man has ever approached the violin? Gladstone compared it with the local. locomotive, yet complete as is the mechanism of the wheeled monster, its type is transitional. Steam is already supplanted by electricity, while the violin is perfection, as perfect as a sonnet, and in its capacity for the expression of emotion next to the human voice. Indeed, it is even more

Starting point is 09:00:40 poignant. Orchestrally massed, it can be as terribly beautiful as an army with banners. In quartet form, it represents the very soul of music. It is both sensuous and intellectual. The modern grand pianoforte with its great range, its opulence of tone, its delicacy of mechanism, is nevertheless a monster of music, if placed beside the violin, with its simple curves, its almost primitive method of music making. The scraping of one substance against another goes back to prehistoric, times, nay, may be seen in the grasshopper and its ingenious manner of producing sound. But the violin, as we know it today, is not such an old invention. It was the middle of the 16th century before it made its appearance, with its varnished and

Starting point is 09:01:36 modelled back. Restricted as is its range of dynamics, the violin has had for its votaries, men of such widely differing temperaments, has Paganese. and Spor, Wilhelm and Saracet, Yoakim and Isay. Its literature does not compare with that of the piano, for which Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, and Brahms have written their choicest music. Yet the intimate nature of the violin, its capacity for passionate emotion, crowns it, and not the organ with its mechanical tonal effects, as the king of instruments. Nor does the voice make the peculiar appeal of the violin. Its lowest note is the G below the treble clef,

Starting point is 09:02:25 and its top note, a mere squeak, but it seems in a few octaves to have imprisoned within its wooden walls, a miniature world of feeling. Even in the hands of a clumsy amateur, it has the formidable power of giving pain, while in the grasp of a master it is capable of arousing the soul. No other instrument has the ecstatic quality, neither the shallow-toned piano-forte, nor the more mellow and sonorous violoncello. The angelic, demoniacal, lovely, intense tones of the violin are without parallel in music or nature. It is as if this box with four strings across its varnished belly had a rarer nervous

Starting point is 09:03:13 system than all other instruments. It is a cry, a shriek, a hymn-deme-dil. heaven, a call to arms, an exquisite evocation, a brilliant series of multicolored visions, a broad song of passion, or mocking laughter. What cannot the violin express if the soul that guides it be that of an artist? Otherwise, it is only a fiddle. It is the hero, the heroine, the vanguard art of every composition. As a solo instrument in a concerto, its still small voice is heard above the din and thunder of the accompaniment. In a word, this tiny music box is the ruler among instruments. Times have changed since 1658 in England when the following delightful ordinance was made for the

Starting point is 09:04:08 benefit of musical genius or otherwise, and be it enacted that if any person, or persons, commonly called fiddlers or minstrels, shall at any time after the said 1st of July, be taken playing, fiddling, or making music in any inn, alehouse, or tavern, or shall be proffering themselves, or desiring, or entreating, any person or persons to hear them play, shall be adjudged, rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars. Decidedly, England was not then the abode of the abode of the day. the muses, for the poor actor suffered in company with the musician. You wonder whether this same penalty would be imposed upon musical managers. They certainly do entreat the public to listen to their

Starting point is 09:04:58 fiddlers. Yet in 1690, when Corelli, the father of violin playing, led the band at Cardinal Otobani's house in Rome, he stopped the music because his churchly patron was talking, and he made an epigram that has since served for other artists. Monsignor remarked this intrepid musician when asked why the band had ceased. I fear the music might interrupt the conversation. How well List knew this anecdote may be recalled by his retort to a Tsar of Russia under similar circumstances. Until a few months ago, I had not heard Eugene Isay play for years.

Starting point is 09:05:43 In the old days he had enchanted my ears, and in company with Gerardi, the violoncellist, and Puno, the pianist, had made music fit for the gods. Considering the flight of the years, I found the art of the Belgian comparatively untouched. Like Lists, like Paderewski, Isay has his good moments and his indifferent. He is the Potorevsky of the strings in his magical interpretations, and unlike his younger contemporaries. He still carves out the whole block of the great classics, sonatas, and concertos. He plays little things tenderly, exquisitely, and the man is first the musician, then the virtuoso. I heard neither Paganini nor spore. Yoakim Wilhelm Wilhelm, Vianowski, and Isay I have heard and seen.

Starting point is 09:06:39 My memory assures me of keener satisfactions than any book about the book about the music of the these giants of the four strings could give me. The first violinist I ever listened to was in the early 70s. I was hardly at the age of musical discrimination. Yet I remember much. It was at the opera, a matinee in the Philadelphia Academy of Music. Nilsson was singing. I can't recall her on that occasion, though it seems only the other day when Carlotta Potty sang the Queen of the Night in the magic flute and limped over the stage. Possibly the lameness fixed the event in my mind more than the music. A front set was dropped between the axe at this particular matinee.

Starting point is 09:07:29 I do not recollect the name of the opera, and through a practicable door came an old gentleman with a violin in his hands. He was white-haired. He wore white side-whiskers, and he looked to my young eyes like a prosperous banker. He played. It was as the sound of falling waters on a moonlight night. I asked the name of the old gentleman. My father said,

Starting point is 09:07:56 Henri Viuton, which told me nothing then, though it means much to me now. What did he play? I do not know. Yet whenever I hear the younger men attack his fantasy caprice, his ballade and polonaise, his concertos, I think proudly. I have heard Vyner.

Starting point is 09:08:16 He was a Belgian, born 1820, died 1881. His style was finished, elegant, charming. He was a pupil of Debario, and represented with his master, perfection in the Belgian school. After an interval of some years, I heard the only pupil of Paganini, as he called himself, Camilleusevori. It was in Paris, 1879. The precise I stay, I can't say, but my letter from Paris, which appeared in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, was dated January 31, 1879. I still preserve it in a venerable scrapbook. I was in my teens, but I wrote, with the courage of youthful ignorance, as follows. It almost sounds like a musical criticism. Although it was generally supposed that Civori, the great violinist, would not play this season in Paris. He nevertheless delighted a large audience last Sunday at the concert

Starting point is 09:09:22 popular with his lovely music. He is no longer a young man, but the vigor and fire of his playing are immense. He gave, with the orchestral accompaniment, a Bersus, his own composition with unapproachable delicacy. It was played throughout with the mute. In contrast, came a movement perpetuel. Civori's tone is not like that of Joachim or Wilhelmahelma, but it is sweeter than either. It reminds one of gold, drawn to cobweb fineness. As an encore, he played the too well-known Carnival of Venice, that it was given in the style of his illustrious master Paganini, who may say? But it was amazing, painful, finally tiresome. That same season I heard Anna Bach, Boscovitz, Deemer, Plont, Theodore Ritter, the two jails,

Starting point is 09:10:21 Fat Alfred, and his thin wife. Savory, 1815, 1894, dapper, modest, stood up in the vast spaces of the Circa Duver, which was engaged every Sunday by Jacques Padalue and his orchestra. Jakob Wolfgang was the real name of this conductor, who braved the wrath of his audiences by putting Wagner on his programs. And one afternoon, we had a pitched battle over Rimsky Korsakov's symphonic poem, Sodka. Savuri played a Tarantella. Every tone was clearly heard in the great crowded auditorium. Pupils of DeBario and Paganini I have heard.

Starting point is 09:11:09 though I hardly recall the style of the former and nothing of the latter. But there was little of Paganini's fiery attack in Savuri. Possibly he was too old. Fire and fury I later found in Vianowski. I must not omit the name of Ola Boul, 1810 to 1880, for, though I heard him as a boy, I best remember him in 1880 when he gave his last concerts in America. In the 50s, while on a visit to my father's house,

Starting point is 09:11:45 he went on his two thumbs around a dining table, lifting his body clear from the ground. His muscular power was remarkable. It showed in the dynamics of his robust and sentimental playing. Spore discouraged him as a boy, but later spoke of his wonderful playing and sureness of his left hand, Unfortunately, like Paganini, he sacrifices what is artistic to something that is not quite suitable to the noble instrument. His tone too is bad.

Starting point is 09:12:19 For Spore, anyone's tone was naturally enough bad, as he possessed the most monumental tone that ever came from a violin. The truth is that Ola Boul was not a classical player. As I remember him, he could not play in strict tempo. Like Chopin, he indulged in the rubato and abused the portamento, but he knew his public. America a half-century ago, particularly in the regions he visited, was not in the mood for sonatas or concertos. Old Dan Tucker and the Arkansas traveler were the mode. Poole played them both, played jigs and old tunes, roused the echoes with a star-spangled banner and Irish men. melodies. He played such things beautifully, and it would have been musical snobbery to say that you

Starting point is 09:13:13 didn't like them. You couldn't help yourself. The grand old fellow bewitched you. He was a handsome Merlin, with a touch of the charlatan, and a touch of list in his tall willowy figure, small waist, and heavy head of hair. Such white hair. It tumbled in masses about his kindly face, like one of his native Norwegian cataracts. He was the most picturesque old man I ever saw, except Walt Whitman, at that time a steady attendant of the Carl Gardner String Quartet concerts in Philadelphia.

Starting point is 09:13:52 And what Walt didn't know about music, he made up in his love for stray dogs. He was seldom without canine company. Those were the days when Premis La Melancholy and Vienowski's Legonde, were the two favorite yet remote peaks of the student's repertoire. How we loved them! Then came Viannowski with Rubenstein in 1872, 1873, and such violin-playing America had never before heard, nor has it since let me hasten to add.

Starting point is 09:14:24 This poll, 1835 to 1880, was a brilliant master. His dash and fire and pathos carried you off your feet. His tone at times was like molten metal. He had a caressing and martial bow. His technique was infallible. His temperament truly Slavic, languorous, subtle, fierce. Vianowski always reminded me of a red hot coal. How chivalric is his Polonaise, that old warhorse. How Elegiac his legend. His favorite pupil was Leopold Lichtenberg, the greatest violin talent that has been thus far unearthed in America. Lichtenberg had everything when a youth, temperament, brains, musical feeling, and great technical ability. After Vienowski followed Wilhelmma, who did not efface his memory, but plunged one into another atmosphere,

Starting point is 09:15:24 that of the calm, profound, untroubled, and classic. No doubt Spor's tone was larger, yet this is difficult to believe. Wilhelmard drew from his instrument the noblest sounds I ever heard. Not Joachim, Nadee, excelled him in cantabile. He was the first to play Wagner transcriptions. No wonder Wagner made him leader of the strings at Beirut in 1876. How he read the Beethoven Concerto, the Bach Chacon, or the D-flatine, Nocturn of Chopin in D, or the much-abused Mendelsohn E. Minor concerto, with Max Voguegritch

Starting point is 09:16:06 accompanying him at the piano. A giant in physique, when he faced his audience, there was something of the majestic fair-haired god Voton in his immobile posture. He never appealed to his public, as did Vianowski. There was always something of chilly grandeur and remoteness in Wilhelm's play. The last time I saw him was at Marian Bod, shortly before his death, where a stoop-shouldered, grey-haired old man, he was taking a cure. He walked slowly, his hands clasped behind him. In his eyes the vacant look of one busy with memories. He reminded me of Beethoven's pictures. Yosef Joachim, that mighty Hungarian, was past his prime when I heard him in London. he played out of tune. Some of his pupils have imitated his failing, but whether in a Beethoven

Starting point is 09:17:04 quartet, concerto, sonata with piano, he always stamped on your consciousness that Yosef Joachim was the greatest violinist that had ever lived. This is, of course, absurd, this unfair comparison of one artist with another. Yet it is human to compare, and if a violinist can evoke such a vision of perfection, then he must be of uncommon powers. Maude Powell, a distinguished pupil of Joachim, has asserted that it took her three years before she could recover herself in the presence of Joachim's overwhelming personality. Yet he struck me as not at all assertive. He seemed an objective player, i.e., you thought only of Beethoven, of Brahms, as he calmly delivered himself of their Olympian measure.

Starting point is 09:17:55 The grand manner is now out of fashion. We care more for exotic rhetoric than for simple and lofty measures. Sarasate and Dengremont charmed me more. Vianowski set my blood coursing faster. But in Joachim's presence, I felt as if near some old Grecian temple hallowed by the presence of oft-worshipped gods. Reminy was a puzzle. He could play divine.

Starting point is 09:18:24 He could play divinely and scratch diabolically. He belonged to that old romantic school in which pose and gesture, contortion and grimace occupied a prominent place. I had an opportunity to study Remigny, whose Austrian name was Hoffman, 1830 to 1898, at close quarters. He brought to my father's house,

Starting point is 09:18:47 in the early 80s, his favorite instruments, and such a wild night of music I never heard. He played hour after hour, everything from Bach to Brahms, and incidentally scolded Brahms for stealing some of his Remini's Hungarian dances, which is a joke, as Brahms only follow the examples of Liszt and Joachim in avowedly employing Hungarian folk melodies. He did such tricks as dashing off in impeccable tune, his arrangement of the D-flat valse of Chopin, in double notes at a terrific tempo. Violinists will understand the feat when I tell them

Starting point is 09:19:29 that the key was the original one. D. Flat. He made the walls shiver when he struck his bow clangorously in the opening chords of the Roccozzi march. What a hero then seemed, this stout little prancing, bald-headed man with the face of an unfrocked priest, how he could talk in a half-dozen different languages.

Starting point is 09:19:52 He had traveled enough and encountered enough celebrated people to fill a dozen volumes with his recollections. He was a violinist of unquestionable power. That he deteriorated in his later years was to have been expected. List understood and appreciated Remini from the first. He nicknamed him the Kosseth of the fiddle. To recall all the celebrities of the violin I have heard since 1870, would be hardly possible. I've forgotten most of them, though I do remember that wonderful boy, Maurice Dengremont, who ended his life, so rich in possibilities. It is said as a billiard marker.

Starting point is 09:20:38 He was spoiled by women, for he was a comely lad. Another wonder child kept his head, and today fascinating Fritz Chrysler is a master of masters, and a favorite in America without peer. He first appeared at Boston, and in 1888. In Paris, I recall Marsik and his polished style, the gallant Sore, Johannes Wolfe, and the brilliant and elegant Timothy Adamowski. And in 1880, Marie Teo and her woman quartet, a member of which was Jean Franco,

Starting point is 09:21:14 the sister of the conductors and violinists, Sam Franco and Nahon Franco. Cesar Thompson the miraculous C. M. Leffler, subtle player, subtle composer, Sarasate with his sweet tone, Brodsky and his masculine manner, Willie Bermester and his pallid pyrotechnics, the learned Shrodiac, the bohemian Andracheck, the dashing Ovida Muson, Bernard Listerman, Karl Hollier, Gregorowich, the languid, brilliant Marto, allegation, Alexander Pachinochinov, the Russian, the musicianly Max Bendix, the astonishing John Rhodes,

Starting point is 09:21:58 the wonder worker Kubelik, and his icy perfections. Koshion, Willie Hess, Ephraim Zimbalist, Albert Spalding, Arthur Hartman, and a myriad of spoiled youths. Von Vexi, Horsowski, all have crossed the map of my memory, and Franz Niesel and the Niesel quartet, dispensers of musical joys for decades, but alas, no more, alas. I would not barter memories of their music-making for a wilderness of virtuosi. I must not forget Joseph White, the Cuban violinist, who was with Theodore Thomas one season. His style was finished and Parisian. He was a mulatto and a handsome man. The night I heard him, he played the Mendelso Concerto.

Starting point is 09:22:49 and at the beginning of the slow movement, his chanterelle broke. Calmly he took concertmaster Richard Arnold's proffered instrument and triumphantly finished the composition. Three violinists abide clear in my recollection. Vianowski, Wilhelmma, and Isay. The last named is dearer because nearer, contrary to the supposed rule that the older the thing, the worse it is. Isay is the magician of the violin. He holds us in a spell with that elastic, curving bow of his,

Starting point is 09:23:24 with those many-colored tones, tender, silky, sardonic, amorous, rich, and ductal. He interprets the classics as well as the romantics, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Viotom as well as Sibelius. Above all else, his mastery of the violin's technical mysteries looms his muse his muse, musical temperament. He has imagination. I have reserved the women for the last, a goodly artistic company. It is not necessary to go back to the Milanola sisters. We still cherish remembrances of Camilla Urso and her broad musicianly manner, the finished style of Norman Nehuda, Maris Soldat, the gifted and unhappy Arma Sankra, Nettie Carpenter, Teresina Tua, who did not become a fiddle fairy when she visited us in 1887,

Starting point is 09:24:23 Leonora Jackson, Dora Becker, Olive Mead, and Maude, and Maude Pau. In Europe many years ago, I heard Marcella Sembrick, who, after playing the E-flat Polonaise of Chopin on the piano, picked up a violin and dashed off the Vianowski Polonaise. These feats were followed by songs, one being Viardo Garcia's arrangement of Chopin's D. Major, Masurca. Sembrick is the blue rose among great singers. Garica, Power, Nikish were at first violinists.

Starting point is 09:24:59 So was Fritz Schiel, late conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. Franz Niesel is a conductor of great skill, so is Frederick Stock, who followed Theodore Thomas as conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Theodore Spearing, formerly concertmaster of the Philharmonic Orchestra, proved himself an excellent conductor. But that a little Polish woman could handle with ease two instruments and sing like an angel besides, borders on the fantastic. Geraldine Morgan is an admirable violin artiste,

Starting point is 09:25:36 who plays solo as well as quartet with equal authority. Maude Powell has fulfilled her early play. promise. She is a mature artiste, one who will never be finished, because she will always study, always improve. A Joachim pupil, she is nevertheless a pupil of Maude Powell, and her playing reveals breadth, musicianship, beauty of tone, and phrasing. She is our greatest American violin virtuosa. I wrote this of Misha Elman, the first of the many Mishas and Yasha. who mew on the fiddle strings, after I heard him play in London. United to an amazing technical precision, there is a still more amazing emotional temperament,

Starting point is 09:26:26 all dominated by a powerful, musical, and mental intellect, uncanny in one not yet out of his teens. What need to add that his conception of Beethoven is neither as lovely as Chrysler's, nor as fascinating as Esays. Elman will mature. In the romantic or the virtuoso realm, he is past master. His tone is lava-like in its warmth. He paints with many colors. He displays numberless nuances of feeling.

Starting point is 09:26:59 The musical in him dominates the virtuoso. Naturally, the pride of hot youth asserts itself, and often self-intoxicated, he intoxicates his audiences, with his sensuous, compelling tone, Hebraic, tragic, melancholy, the boisterousness of the Russian, the swift modulation from mad caprice

Starting point is 09:27:21 to Slavic despair, Elman is a magician of many moods. When I listen to him, I almost forget Isay. Yet when I heard Isay play last season, it was Elman that I forgot for the moment. After all, a critic too may have his moods. and now comes another conqueror the lad yasha hyphitz from russia a pupil of leopold hour and an artist of such extraordinary attainments that the greatest among contemporary violinists is it necessary to mention names

Starting point is 09:27:56 have said of him that his art begins where theirs ends and that they will shut up shop when he plays here all of which is a flattering tribute but it has been made before Highfits, however, may be the dark horse in the modern fiddle sweepstakes. End of Chapter 28. Chapter 29 of Unicorns. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Alivia.

Starting point is 09:28:37 Unicorns by James Hunaker Chapter 29, Riding the Whirlwind. Once, Swinburne, in a Baudelaire mood, saying, Shall no new sin be born for men's troubles? And it was an Asiatic potentate who offered a prize for the discovery of a new pleasure. Or was it a sauce?

Starting point is 09:28:55 Mankind soon wearies. The miracles of yesteryear are the commonplaces of today. Steam, telegraphy, electric motors, wireless, and now wireless telephony are accepted as a matter of course by the man in the street. How stale will seem women's suffrage and prohibition after they have conquered. In the world of art, conditions are analogous. The cubist nail drove out the impressionist,

Starting point is 09:29:19 and the cubist will vanish if the futurist hammer is sufficiently heavy. Nevertheless, there is a novel sensation in store for those who make a first flight through the air. I don't mean in a balloon, whether captive or free. In the case of the former, a trip to the top of the Washington Monument or the Eiffel Tower will suffice, and while I wrote a Zeppelin at Berlin in 1912, for a hundred marks or about $25, that was the tariff, and saw a potsdam at my feet, yet I was unsatisfied. The passengers sat in a comfortable salon, ate, drank, even smoked. The traveling was so smooth as to suggest an inland lake on a summer day. No danger was to be apprehended. The monster airship left its hangar and returned to it on schedule time. The entire trip lacked the

Starting point is 09:30:06 flavor of adventure, and that leads me to a personal confession. am not a sport. In my veins flows sporting blood, but only in the Darwinian sense am I a sport, a deviation from the normal history of my family, which has always been devoted to athletic pleasures. A baseball match in which carnage ensues is a mild diversion for me. I can't understand the fury of the contest. I yawn, though the frenzied enthusiasm of the spectators interests me. I have fallen asleep over a cricket match at Lourdes in London, and the biggest boar of all was a Sunday afternoon bullfight in Madrid. It was such a waste of potential beefsteaks. Prize fights discussed, shell races are pural, football matches, smack of obituaries. As for golf, that is a prelude to senility,

Starting point is 09:30:58 or the antechamber to the undertaker's establishment. The swiftness of film pictures has sent a new metronomic standard for modern sports. I suppose playing Bach Fugues on the keyboard is as exciting a game as any, that is, for those who like it. A four-voiced polyphony at a good gait is positively hair-raising. It beats poker. All this is a preliminary to my little tale. Conceive me as an elderly person of generous waste measurement, slightly reckless like most

Starting point is 09:31:29 near-sighted humans. This recklessness is psychical. Safety first, and I always watch my step. Painful experience taught me years. ago, the perils that lurk in ambush for a Johnny look in the air. Flying in heavier-than-air machines fascinated me. The fantastic stories of H.G. Wells were ever a joy. When the argonauts of the air appeared, flying was practically assured, although a Paris mathematician had demonstrated with ineluctible logic that it was impossible, as proved a member of the Institute a century earlier

Starting point is 09:32:01 that birds couldn't fly. It was an illusion. Well, the rights flew. even if Langley did not, Langley, the genuine father of the aeroplane. Living so long in France and Belgium, I had grown accustomed to the whirring of aerial motors, a sound not unlike that of a motorboat or the buzzing of a sawmill. I became accustomed to this drone above the housetops, and since my return to America, I have often wondered why in the land where the aeroplane first flew, so little public interest was manifested. To be sure, there are aeroclubs, but they never fly where the interest of the greater

Starting point is 09:32:38 public can be intrigued. Either there is a hectic excitement over some record broken or else the aviator sulks in his tent. Is the money devil at the bottom of the trouble? Sport for sports sake, like art for art's sake, is rarely encountered. The government has taken up flying, but that is for pragmatic purposes. The airplane as a weapon of defense, not the airplane as a new and agreeable pleasure. We are not a disinterested nation. Even symphony concerts and opera and the of souls our commercial propositions, else would our skies be darkened by flying machines instead of smoke, and our churches thronged with aviators? Walking on the famous and fatiguing boardwalk of Atlantic City, I suddenly heard a familiar buzzing in the air and looked up. There it was,

Starting point is 09:33:26 a big flying boat like a prehistoric dragonfly, speeding from the inlet down to the million-dollar pier. Presently, there were two of them flying, and I felt as if I were in a civilized land. On the trolleys were signs, see the flying boats in the inlet. I did the very next morning. I had no notion of being a passenger. I was not tempted by the thought. But as Satan finds work for idle hands, I lounged down the beach to the Kendrick biplane and stared my full at its slender proportions. A young man in a bathing suit explained to me the technique of flying and insinuated that hundreds and hundreds had flown during the season without accident. Afternoon saw me again on the sands, an excited witness of a flight. Excited because I stood behind the motor when it started for a

Starting point is 09:34:19 preliminary tryout. Tuning up is the slang phrase of the profession, and the cyclonic gale blew my hat away, loosened my collar and made my teeth chatter. Such a tornetic roar. I firmly resolved that never would I trust myself in such a devil's contrivance. Why, it was actually riding the whirlwind, and perhaps reaping a watery grave. What else but that? On a blast of air you sail aloft and along. When the air ceases, you drop, less than 45 miles an hour, and this in a flimsy box kite. Never for me. Not today, Baker, call tomorrow with a crusty cottage, as we used to stay in dear old Lennon years ago. Nevertheless, the poison was in my veins. Cunningly it began to work. I saw a passenger, a fat man, weighing 204 pounds, I asked for the figures, trust up like a calf

Starting point is 09:35:16 in the arms of a slight muscular youth, who carried him a limp burden, and deposited him on a seat in the prow of the boat. I turned my head away. I am not easily stirred, having reported musical and theatrical happenings for a quarter of a century. But the sight of that stout male, a man and a brother, I didn't know him from Adam, evoked a cord of pity in my breast. I felt that I would never set eyes again on that prospective food for fishes. I quickly left the spot and returned to my hotel, determined to say, retro me satanus,

Starting point is 09:35:50 if that personage should happen to show me his hooves, horns, and hide. But he did not. The devil is a subtle beast. He had simply set jangling the wires of suggestion, and my nerves accomplished the rest. One morning, a few days later, I awoke, parched with desire. I drank much strong tea to steady be and smoked unremittingly. Again, during the early afternoon, I found myself up the beach. My feet take hold on hell, I said to myself, but it was only hot sand.

Starting point is 09:36:26 I teased myself with speculations as to whether, the game was worth the candle. Yes, I had got that far, traversing a fast mental territory between the no-sayer and the yes-sayer. I was doomed, and I knew it when I began to circle about the machine. Courteously, the Bonnie Youth explained matters. It was a Glenn H. Curtis Hydro airplane, furnished with one of the new Curtis engines of 90 horsepower, capable of flying 70 to 90 miles an hour of lifting 400 pounds and weighing in at about a ton. Was it safe? Were the taut, skinny piano wires that manipulated the steering gear and the plane durable? Didn't they ever snap? Of course they were durable and of course they occasionally snapped. What then? Why, you drop in spiral fashion

Starting point is 09:37:16 Volplane, charming vocable. But if the engine? Same thing. You would come to Earth, rather water, as naturally as a child takes to the breast, nothing to fear. Young Beryl Kendrick is an Atlantic City product. He was a professional swimmer and lifeguard, and will look after you. The price is $15, formerly $25, but competition, which is said to be the life of trade, has operated in favor of the public. Rather emotionally, I bade my man good day, promising to return for a flight the next morning. A promise I certainly did not mean to keep.

Starting point is 09:37:53 heap. This stupendous announcement he received coolly, flying to him, was a quotidian banality. And then I noticed that the blazing sun had become darkened. Was it an eclipse? Or were some horrid, monstrous shapes like the suppostitious spindles spoken of by Langley, devouring the light of our parent planet? No, it was the chamber of my skull that was full of shadows. The obsession was complete. I would go up, but I must suffer terribly in the interim. Why should I fly and pay fifteen good shekels for the unwelcome privilege? I computed the cost of various beverages, and, as a consoling thought, recalled Mark Twain's story of the Western editor, who, missing from his accustomed haunts, was later found serenely drunk,

Starting point is 09:38:43 passionately reading to a group of miners from a table his lantern illuminated speech, in which he denounced the cruel, raw waste of grain in the making of the, of bread when so many honest men were starving for whiskey. Yet did I feel that I would not begrudge my hard-earned royalties. I'm not a bestseller. And thus tormented between the devil of cowardice and the deep sea of curiosity, I retired and dreamed all night of fighting strange birds that attacked me in an airplane. I shan't weary you with the further analysis of my soul states during this tempestuous period. I ate a light breakfast, swallowed much tea. Then I resolutely went in company with a friend, and we boarded an inlet car.

Starting point is 09:39:25 I had, the day previous, resorted to a major expedient of cowards. I had said, so as to bolster up my fluttering resolution, that I was going to fly, an expedient that seldom misses, for I should never have been able to face the chief clerk, the head waiter, or the proprietor of the hotel, if I had failed to keep my promise. Boaster, swaggerer, I muttered to myself, Enrute, now are you satisfied? Thou tremblest, carcass, thou wouldst tremble much more of thou newest, whither I shall soon lead thee. I quoted Turane, I was beginning to babble something about Icarus, or was it Fayton, or Simon Magus, brought to earth in the Coliseum by a prayer from the lips of

Starting point is 09:40:07 St. Peter when we arrived. How I hated the corner where we alighted. It seemed to mean and dingy and sinister in the dazzling sunlight, a red-hot Saturday. September 11th, 1915, and the hour was 10.30 a.m. A condemned criminal would not have noted more clearly every detail of the life he was about to quit. We plowed through the sand. We reached the scaffold. At least it looked like one to me. Hello, here's a church. Let's go in. I felt like exclaiming in sheer desperation, remembering Dickens and Mr. Wemick. I would have, such was my blue funk, quoted holy scripture to the sandlopers, but I hadn't the chance. I asked my friend, and my voice sounded steady enough, whether the wind and weather seemed propitious for flying.

Starting point is 09:41:00 Never better was the reply, and my heart went down to my boots. I really think I should have escaped if a stout man with a piratical mustache hadn't approached me and asked, going up today? I marveled at his calmness and wished for his instant dissolution, but I gave an affirmative shake of the head, cornered at last. Handing my watch, hat, and wallet to my friend, I coldly awaited the final preparations. I had forgotten my ear protector, but cotton wool would answer the purpose of making me partially deaf to the clangorous vibration of the propeller blades, which resemble in a magnified shape the innocent air fans of offices and cafes.

Starting point is 09:41:42 I essayed one more joke, true gallows humor, before I was lead like a lamb, a tough one, to the slaughter. I asked an attendant to whom I had paid the official fee if my widows would be refunded the money in case of accident, but this antique and tasteless witticism was indifferently received, as it deserved. Finally, the young man gave me a raincoat, grabbed me around the waist, and bidding me clasp his neck, he carried me out into shallow water and sat me beside the air pilot, who looked a mere lad in his bathing clothes. My hand must have been trembling. Ah, that old. That old. old piano hand, for he inquiringly eyed me. The motor was screaming as we flew through the water toward the inlet. I had in courage of mind to make a farewell signal to my companion. Too late,

Starting point is 09:42:29 we're off, I thought, and at once my trepidation vanished. I had, for some unknown reason, possibly because of absolute despair, suffered a rich sea change. We churned the waves. I saw tiny sails studding the deep blue. Men fished from the shore. As we neared the inlet where a sham wooden hotel stands on the sandy point. The sound of the motor grew intenser. We began to lift. Not all at once, but gradually. Suddenly, her nose poked skyward, and the boat climbed the air with an ease that was astonishing. No shock, no jerkiness. We simply glided aloft as if the sky were our native heath. You will pardon the hibernacism, as if determined to pay a visit to the round, blazing sun bathing naked in the brilliant blue.

Starting point is 09:43:16 And with the mounting ascent, I became unconscious of my corporeal vesture. I had become pure spirit. I feared nothing. The legend of angels became a certainty. I was on the way to the fourth-dimensional vista. I recalled Poncaray's suggestion that there is no such thing as matter, only holes in the ether, nature embracing a vacuum instead of abhorring it, a Swiss cheese universe. Joseph Conrad has said man on earth is an unforeseen accident, which does not stand close investigation. But man in the air? Man is just into wings. Was I not proving it? Flying is the sport of gods, and should be of humans, now that the motor car has become slightly promiscuous. The inlet and thoroughfare at my feet were a network of silvery ribbons.

Starting point is 09:44:05 The heat was terrific, the glare almost unbearable. But, I no longer sneezed. Aviation solves the hay fever problem. The wind forced me to clench my teeth. We were hurled along at 70 miles an hour and up several thousand feet, yet below the land seemed near enough to touch. As we swung across the masts of yachts,

Starting point is 09:44:24 I wondered that we didn't graze them, so elusive was the crystal clearness of the atmosphere, a magic mirror that made the remote contiguous. The mast with the sunken schooner hard by the sandbar looked like a lead pencil one could grasp and write a message to Mars. I was become lyrical. It is inscapable up in the air. The blood seethes. Ecstasy sets in, the kinetic ecstasy of a spinning top. I gazed at the pilot. He twisted his wheel nonchalantly

Starting point is 09:44:52 as if in an earthly automobile. I looked over the sides of the cedar boat and was not giddy, for I have lived years at the top of an apartment house, ten stories high, from which I daily viewed policemen killing time on the sidewalks. Besides, I have strong eyes in the stomach of a drover. Therefore, no giddiness, no nausea, only exaltation as we swooped down to lower levels. Atlantic City, bizarre, yet meaningless, outrageously planned and executed, stretched its ugly shape beneath us. The most striking objects were the exotic, hyphenated hotel with its Asiatic monoliths and dome, and its vast, grandiose neighbor, a mound of concrete, the biggest hotel in the world. The piers were salient silhouettes. A checkerboard seemed the city.

Starting point is 09:45:38 which modulated into a tremendous arabesque of ocean and sky. I preferred to stare seaward. The absorbent cotton in my ears was transformed into gun cotton, so explosive the insistent drumming of the motor engine. Otherwise, we flew on an even keel, only an occasional dip and a sideways swing reminding me that I wasn't footing the ordinary highway. The initial intoxication began to wear off,

Starting point is 09:46:01 but not the sense of freedom, a glorious freedom. Truly, mankind will not be free till all fly. Alas, though we become winged, we remain mortal. We may shed our cumbersome pedestrian habits, but we take up in the air with us our petty souls. I found myself indulging in very trite thoughts. What a pity that war should be the first to degrade this delightful and stimulating sport. Worse followed.

Starting point is 09:46:27 Why couldn't I own a machine? Base envy, you see. The socialistic leaven had begun to work. No use. We shall remain human, even in heaven or hell. I have been asked to describe the sensation of flying. I can't. It seems so easy, so natural. If you've ever dreamed of flying, I can only say that your dream will be realized in an airplane.

Starting point is 09:46:49 Dreams do come true sometimes. Curiously enough, I've not dreamed of flying since. But as there is an end, even to the most tedious story, so mine must finish. Suddenly, the sound of the engine ceased. The silence was thrilling, almost painful. and then in huge circles, as if we were descending the curves of an invisible corkscrew, we came down, the bow of the flying boat pointing at an angle of 45 degrees. Still no dizziness, only a sense of regret that the trip was so soon over. It had endured an eternity,

Starting point is 09:47:23 but occupied precisely 21 minutes. We reached the water and settled on the foam like a feather. Then we churned toward the beach. Again, I was carried, this time onto solid land, where I had ridiculous trouble in getting the cotton from my harassed eardrums. Perhaps my hands were unsteady, but if they were, my feet were not. I reached the inlet via the boardwalk, making record time, and drew the first happy sigh in a week as I sat down, lighted a cigar, and twiddled my fingers at a waiter. Even if I had enjoyed a new pleasure I didn't propose to give up the old ones,

Starting point is 09:47:58 then my nerves. And when I meet Gabriel de Nunezio, I can look him in the eye. He flew over Trieste, but I flew over my fears, a moral as well as a physical victory for a timid, conservative. End of Chapter 29. Recording by Al-Livia. Chapter 30 of Unicorns. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Unicorns by James Hunaker chapter 30 prayers for the living from the editorial page of the new york sun December 31 1916 it is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed

Starting point is 09:48:57 from their sins and it is as holy a prayer that begs from the god of chance his pity for the living I, it is those who are about to live, not to die, that we should salute. Life is the eternal slayer. Death is but the final punctuation of the vital paragraph. Life is also the betrayer. A cosmical conspiracy of deception encircles us. We call it Maya and flatter our finite sense of humor that we are no longer entrapers. by the shining appearance of things when we say aloud,

Starting point is 09:49:40 stay thou art so subtle that we know you for what you are, the profoundest instinct of life, its cruel delight in pretending to be what it is not. We are now all of us who think that we think, newly born fowths with eyes unbandaged of the supreme blinders, time and space. Nature closed the same. skeleton in a motley suit of flesh, but our super-sharpened ears overhear the rattling of the bones.

Starting point is 09:50:14 We are become so wise that love itself is no longer a sentiment, only a sensation. Religion is first cousin to voluptuousness, and if we are so minded, we may jig to the tune of the stars, up the dazzling staircase, and sneer at the cloud gates of the infinite inane. naught succeeds like negation, and we swear that in the house of the undertaker it is impolite to speak of shrouds. We are nothing, if not determinists, and we believe that the devil deserves the hindmost. We live in order to forget life, for our delicate machinery of apperception. There is no longer right or wrong. Vice and virtue are the acid and alkali.

Starting point is 09:51:05 existence, and as too much acid deranges the stomach, so vice corrods the soul, and thus we are virtuous by compulsion. Yet we know that evil serves its purpose in the vast chemistry of being, and if banished, the consequences might not be for universal good. Other evils would follow in the strain of a too comprehensive mitigation, and our end a stale swamp of vain virtues. Resist not evil, which may mean the reverse of what it seems to preach. The master, modern, immoralist, has said embrace evil, that we may be over and done with it. Toys are our ideals, glory, goodness, wealth, health, happiness, all toys, except health, health of the body, of the soul, and the first shall be last. The human soul in health, but there is no spiritual health.

Starting point is 09:52:18 The mystic Dr. Toller has said, God does not reside in a vigorous body, sinister, nevertheless, equitable. The dolorous certitude that the most radiant of existences ends in the defeat of disease and death, that happiness is relative, a word empty of meaning, in the light of experience, and non-existent as an absolute, that the only divine oasis in our feverish activities is sleep. Sleep, the prelude, to the profound and eternal silence. Why, then, this gabble about soul states,

Starting point is 09:52:59 and the peace that passeth all understanding, simply because the red corpuscles that rule our destinies are when dynamic mighty breeders of hope. If the powers and principalities of darkness prevail, our guardian angels, the phagocytes, are dominated by the leukocytes, gods and devils, or mused and our remand, and other phantasms of this guy, may all be put on a microscopic slide and their struggles noted.

Starting point is 09:53:34 And the evil ones are ever victors in the diabolical game. No need to insist on it. In the heart of mankind, there is a tiny shrine. With its burning taper, the idol is self. Their propitiatory light is for subliminal foes. Alas, in vain, we succumb, and in our weakness we sink into the grave. If only we were sure of the river sticks afterward, we should pay the fairy tax with joy, better Hades than the poppy of oblivion, ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever,

Starting point is 09:54:16 as Sir Thomas Brown sagely remarks. The pious and worthy Dr. Jeremy Taylor, who built cathedral-like structures of English prose to the greater glory of God, and for the edification of ambitious rhetoricians, has dwelt upon the efficacy of prayer in a singularly luminous passage. Holy prayer procures the ministry and services of angels. It rescinds the decrees of God.

Starting point is 09:54:48 It cures sickness and obtains pardon. It arrests the sun in its course and stays the wheels of. of the chariot of the moon. It rules over all God's creatures and opens and shuts the storehouses of rain. It unlocks the cabinet of the womb and quenches the violence of fire. It stops the mouths of lines and reconciles our sufferance and weak faculties with the violence of torment and sharpness of persecution. It pleases God and supplies all our needs. But, prayer that can do this much for us can do nothing at all, without holiness, for God heareth

Starting point is 09:55:33 not sinners, but if any man be a worshipper of God, and doth his will, him he heareth. It should not be forgotten that Taylor, perhaps the greatest English prose masters save John Milton, was a stickler for good works as well as faith. He was considered almost heterodox, because of his violence of speech when the subject of deathbed repentance became a topic of discussion. Indeed, his bishop remonstrated with him because of his stiff-necked opinions to joust through life as at a pleasure tournament, and when the dues of death dampened the forehead to call on God in your extremity seemed to this eloquent divine an act of slinking cowardice. far better face the evil one in a defiant spirit than knock for admittance at the back door of paradise and try to sneak by the winged policeman into a vulgar bliss unwon unhoped for undeserved

Starting point is 09:56:39 therefore the rather startling statement god heareth not sinners read in the light of bishop taylor's fervent conception of man's duty hath its just But this atmosphere of proverbial commonplaces and insipesated gloom should not be long maintained when the courses of the sun are plunging southward in the new year, when the huntsman is up at Oyster Bay, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia, what a bold and adventurous piece of nature is man, yet how he stares at life as a frowning entertainment. Why must we act our antipities, when all Africa and her prodigies are in us? Ergo, let us be cheerful. God is with the world.

Starting point is 09:57:30 Let us pray that during the ensuing year no rest shall color our soul into a gingy red. Let us pray for the living that they may be loosed from their politics and see life steadily and whole. Let us pray that we may not take it on ourselves to feel holier than our neighbors. Let us pray that we be not cursed with the itching desire to reform our fellows, for the way of the reformer is hard, and he always gets what he deserves, the contempt of his fellow men. He is usually a hypocrite. Let us pray that we are not struck by religious zeal. Religious people are not always good people.

Starting point is 09:58:13 Good people are not envious, jealous, penurious, censorious, or busy bodies, are too much bound up in the prospect of the moat in their brother's eye, and unmindful of the beam, in their own. Furthermore, good people do not unveil with uncharitable joy the faults of women. Have faith, have hope, and remember that charity is as great as chastity. Let us pray for the misguided folk, who forgetful, of Mother Church or wisdom, her constellations flock to the tents of lewd, itinerant mumbo-jumbo-jum-hollers, that blaspheme the sacred name, as they epileptically leap, shouting, glory, kingdom, come, and please settle at the captain's office. Though they run on all fours, embark as hyenas, they shone out into the city of the saints, being money-changes in the temple, and tributtal. type-sellers of souls, better toffet and its burning pitch than a wilderness of such apes of God. Some men and women of culture and social position endorse these sorry buffoons, the apology for their paradoxical conduct, being any poured in a storm, any degrading circus,

Starting point is 09:59:30 so it be followed by a mock salvation, but salvation for whom? What deity cares for such foaming at the mouth, such fustian? Conversion is silent and comes from within and not to the dim of brass bands and screaming hallelujahs. It takes all sorts of gods to make the cosmos, but why return to the antics and fetishes of our primate ancestors, the cave dwellers? This squirming and panting and brief reformed true religion? On the contrary, it is a throwback to bestiality, to the vilest instincts. A soul that has to be saved by such means is a soul not worth a saving. To the discard with it, we are flaming in purgatorial fires,

Starting point is 10:00:21 and may be refashioned for future reincarnation on some other planet. Abusive drink is to be deplored, but prohibition is more enslaving than alcohol, paganism in its most exotic forms, is preferable to this prize-ring Christianity, when may be zealous without wallowing in debasing superstition. Again, let us pray for these imbeciles and for the charlatans who are blinding them. Neither arts and sciences nor politics and philosophies will save the soul.

Starting point is 10:00:54 The azure root lies beyond the gates of ivory and the gates of horn. Let us pray for our sisters, the suffragettes, who are still suffering from the injustice of man, now some million of years. Let us pray that they be given the ballot to prove to them its utter futility as a cure-all, with it they shall be neither happier nor different, once a woman, always a martyr. Let them not be deceived by elusive phrases. If they had not been oppressed, they would today be free, alas, free from their sex. Free from the burden of family, free like men to carry.

Starting point is 10:01:32 on the rude labors of this ruder earth, to what purpose, to become second-rate men, when nature has endowed them with qualities that men vainly emulate, vainly seek to evoke their spirit in the arts and literature. Ages, past, woman, should have attained

Starting point is 10:01:48 that impossible goal, oppression, or no. In fact, adversity has made man what he is, and woman, too. Pray that she may not be tempted by the mirage into the desert, there to perish of thirst, for the promised land.

Starting point is 10:02:04 Nearly a century ago, George Saint, was preaching the equality of the sexes, and rightly enough, what has come of it? The vote, political office, professions, business opportunities, yes, all these things, but not universal happiness. Woman's sphere, stale phrase, is any one she hankers after,

Starting point is 10:02:24 but let her not deceive herself. Her future will strangely resemble her past. William Dean House was not wrong when he wrote, woman has only her choice in self-sacrifice, and sometimes not even the choosing. Why? Why are eclipses? Why are some men prohibitionists? Why do hens cluck after laying eggs? Let us pray for warring women that their politically ambitious leaders may no longer dupe them with fallacious promises, surely a pathetic fallacy, but then females rush in where fools fear to tread. And lastly, beloved sisters and brothers, let us heartily pray that our imperial democracy, or is it a democratic empire, our plutocratic republic, or should we say republican plutocracy, may be kept from war, avoid the drums and tramplings of three conquests, but by the eternal Jehovah, God of battles, if we are forced to fight, then let us fight like patriotic Americans, and not gently coup, like pacifists and other sultry south wind.

Starting point is 10:03:29 a billion for preparedness, but not a penny for pork, say we. And by the same token, let us pray that those thundering humbugs and parasites who call themselves labor leaders, the blind leading the blind, forever vanish, because of their contumacious acts, an egregious bamboozling of their victims because of their false promises of an earthly paradise in a golden age, they deserve the harshest condemnation. Like certain oriental discourses, our little morality, which began in the mosque, has rambled not far from the tavern. Nevertheless, let us pray for the living, as well as the dead. Or a moose. End of Chapter 30.

Starting point is 10:04:17 End of Unicorns by James Hunaker.

Classic Audiobook Collection - Unicorns by James Huneker ~ Full Audiobook [speeches]

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