Ivory Apes and Peacocks Part 3

III

Tolstoy the artist! When his vagaries are forgotten, when all his books are rags, when his very name shall be a vague memory, there will live the portrait of Anna Karenina. How dwarfed are his other achievements compared with the creation of this woman, and to create a living character is to be as the G.o.ds. Tolstoy has painted one of the three women in the fiction of the nineteenth century. If the roll-call of the century is ever sounded, these three women shall have endured "the drums and tramplings" of many conquests, and the contiguous dust of those fictional creatures not built for immortality. Balzac's Valreie Marneffe, the Emma Bovary of Flaubert, and the Russian's Anna Karenina are these daughters of earth--flesh and blood, tears and l.u.s.t, and the pride of life that killeth.

Despite Tolstoy's religious mania, I have never doubted his sincerity for a moment. It is a mysterious yet potent factor in the psychology of such an artist as he that whatever he did he did with tremendous sincerity. That is the reason his fiction is nearer reality than all other fictions, and the reason, too, that his realities, _i. e._, his declarations of faith, are nearer other men's fictions. When he writes of his conversion, like John Bunyan, he lets you see across the very sill of his soul. And he does it artistically. He is not conscious that art enters into the mechanism of this spiritual evisceration; but it does. St. Augustine, John Bunyan, John Henry Newman wrote of their adventures of the spirit in letters of fire, and in all three there is a touch of the sublime navete of childhood's outpourings.

I agree with the estimate of Tolstoy by Merejkowski. The main points of this study have been known to students who followed Tolstoy's extraordinary career for the past quarter of a century. Ibsen's individualism appeals. Better his torpedo exploding a thousand times under the social ark than the Oriental pa.s.sivity of the Russian. There is hope in the message of Brand; none in Tolstoy's nihilism. One glorifies the will, the other denies, rejects it. No comparison can be made between the two wonderful men as playwrights. Yet Tolstoy's Powers of Darkness is brutal melodrama when compared to Ibsen's complex dramatic organisms. But what a nerve-shattering revelation is The Death of Ivan Ilyitch. This is the real Tolstoy.

How amateurish is the att.i.tude of the Tolstoy disciple who cavils at his masterpieces. What is mere art compared to the message! And I say: what are all his vapourings and fatidical croonings on the tripod of pseudo-prophecy as compared to Anna Karenina? There is implicit drama, implicit morality in its n.o.ble pages, and a segment of the life of a nation in War and Peace. With preachers and saviours with quack nostrums the world is already well stocked. Great artists are rare.

Every day a new religion is born somewhere--and it always finds followers. But art endures, it outlives dynasties, religions, divinities. It is with Tolstoy the artist we are enamoured. He may deliver his message of warning to a careless world--which only p.r.i.c.ks up its ears when that message takes on questionable colour, as in the unpalatable Kreutzer Sonata. (Yes; that was eagerly devoured for its morbid eroticism.) We prefer the austerer Ibsen, who presents his men and women within the frame of the drama, absolutely without personal comment or _parti pris_--as before his decadence did Tolstoy in his novels. Ibsen is the type of the philosophical anarch, the believer in man's individuality, in the state for the individual, not the individual for the state. It is at least more dignified than the other's flood of confessions, of hysterical self-accusations, of penitential vows, and abundant lack of restraint. Yet no one doubts Tolstoy's repentance. Like Verlaine's it carried with it its own proofs.

But why publish to the world these intimate soul processes, fascinating as they are to laymen and psychologists alike? Why not keep watch with his G.o.d in silence and alone? The reason was (only complicated with a thousand other things, for Tolstoy was a complex being and a Slav), the plain reason was, we repeat, because Leo Nikolaievitch was an artist. He obeyed that demon known to Socrates and Goethe, and minutely recorded his mental and emotional fluctuations. And with Richard Wagner and Dostoevsky, Tolstoy is one of the three most emotional temperaments of the nineteenth century.

Unlike Ibsen or Nietzsche, he does not belong to the twentieth century; his religion, his social doctrines are atavistic, are of the past. Tolstoy is what the French call _un cerebral_, which, as Arthur Symons points out, is by no means a man of intellect. "_Un cerebral_ is a man who feels through his brain, in whom emotion transforms itself into idea, rather than in whom idea is transformed by emotion."

How well that phrase fits Tolstoy--the fever of the soul! He has had the fever of the soul, has subdued it, and his recital of his struggles makes breathless reading. They are depicted by an artist, an emotional artist, and, despite his protestations, by one who will die an artist and be remembered, not as the pontiff of a new dispensation, but as a great world artist.

An admirer has said of him that "confession has become his second nature"; rather it was a psychological necessity. The voice that cried from the comfortable wilderness of Yasnaya Polyana furnished unique "copy" for newspapers. Alas! the pity of it all. The moral dyspepsia that overtook Carlyle in middle life was the result of a lean, spoiled, half-starved youth; the moral dyspepsia that seized the soul of the wonderful Tolstoy was the outcome of a riotous youth, a youth overflowing with the "joy of life." Ibsen, like Carlyle, battled in his early days with poverty; but his message--if you will have a definite message (Oh, these literal, unimaginative folk of the Gradgrind sort, who would wring from the dumb mysterious beauty of nature definite meanings--as if sheer existence itself is not its own glorious vindication!)--may be a hopeful one. The individual is all in all; he is the evangel of the future; his belief is buoyant and Northern; whereas Tolstoy's sour outlook, his constant girding at the vanities of life (after he had, Solomon-like, tasted of them to the full) is Eastern; his is the Oriental fatalism, the hopeless doctrine of determinism. He discovers a new sin every day. Better one hour of Nietzsche's dancing madness than a cycle of Tolstoy's pessimistic renunciations. And all his ethical propaganda does not shake in the least our conviction of the truth and grandeur of Tolstoy's art.

Of the disciples the son of Tolstoy, Count Ilya, tells us in no uncertain accents:

My father had good reason for saying that the "Tolstoyites" were to him the most incomprehensible sect and the furthest removed from his way of thinking that he had ever come across. "I shall soon be dead,"

he sadly predicted, "and people will say that Tolstoy taught men to plough and reap and make boots; while the chief thing that I have been trying so hard to say all my life, the thing I believe in the most important of all, they will forget."

IV

THE YOUNGER CHOIR

Let us believe that Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Dostoevsky, Turgenieff, and Tolstoy are cla.s.sics. As long as Russian, sonorous and beautiful tongue, is spoken, they will never die. And their successors? What is the actual condition of Russian literature at the present time? It is the bare truth to say that a period of stagnation set in during the decade after Turgenieff's death. Emigration carried with it the best brains of the land. We need not dwell upon the publicists, nor yet stir the muddy stream of agitation. It has been the misfortune of Russian literary men to be involved in dangerous political schisms and revolutionary movements; their misfortune, and perhaps their good luck. For dramatic material they have never been at a loss, though their art has suffered, and depth of feeling has been gained at a sad waste of other qualities. That grand old humourist Gogol has had no successors. Humour in Russia is a suspected thing.

Even if there were a second Gogol he would never be allowed to put on the boards a second Revizor. We do not mean to a.s.sert that humour has died out altogether in literature, but it is not the special gift of those who write nowadays. Since Gogol or coeval with him, only men of secondary importance have been humourists: Uspenski, Ostrovski, Saltykov (Chtchedrine), or the author of the novel Oblomov, Gontcharov by name.

Maikov, Nadsohn, Polonski, Garchin, Korolenko, Tchekov were all men of talent; the last in particular, preceptor and friend to Gorky in his days of want, was a novelist of high artistic if morbid powers. He is dead. It is when we turn to the living that we realise what a flatland is Russian literature now. A writer and critic, Madame Z. Hippius, attempted in the Paris _Mercure de France_ to give an idea of the situation. She admitted the inadequacy of her sketch. The troubled political map of Russia has not been conducive to ripe artistic production. As she says, even the writers who refused to meddle with politics are marked men; politics in the shape of the secret police comes to them. Madame Hippius makes the a.s.sertion that literature in Russian has never existed in the sense of a literary _milieu_, as an organic art possessing traditions and continuity; for her, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenieff are but isolated men of genius. A glance back at the times and writings of such critics as Bielinski, Dobroliubov, and Nekrasov--a remarkable poet--disproves this statement. Without a Gogol the later novelists would be rather in the air. He first fas.h.i.+oned the bricks and mortar of native fiction. Read Kropotkin, Osip-Luri, E. s.e.m.e.nov, Walizewski, Melchior de Vogue, and Leo Wiener if you doubt the wealth and variety of this literature.

Among living prose writers two names are encountered: Maxim Gorky and Leonide Andreiev. Of the neurotic Gorky there is naught to be said that is encouraging. He was physically ill when in America and as an artist in plain decadence. He had shot his bolt in his tales about his beloved vagabonds. He had not the long-breathed patience or artistic skill for a novel. His novels, disfigured by tirades and dry attempts at philosophical excursions, are all failures. When his tramps begin to spout Nietzsche on their steppes the artificial note is too apparent. His plays are loose episodes without dramatic action or climax, sometimes moving, as in the case of Nachtasyl, and discordant in The Children of the Sun. Gorky had a natural talent; in his stories a submerged generation became eloquent. And he became a doctrinaire.

Nietzsche finished the ruin that Marx had begun; his art, chiefly derived from Dostoevsky and Tchekov, succ.u.mbed to a sentimental socialism.

Andreiev is still strong, though enveloped in "mystic anarchism." He is as naturally gifted as Gorky and a thinker of more precision. His play, Les Tenebres, reveals the influences of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

It is a shocking arraignment of self-satisfied materialism. A young revolutionary is the protagonist. The woman in the case belongs to the same profession as Dostoevsky's Sonia. Not encouraging, this. Yet high hopes are centred upon Andreiev. For the rest there is Vladimir Soloviev, who is a poet-metaphysician with a following. He has mystic proclivities. Scratch a Russian writer and you come upon a mystic. He is against clericalism and believes in an "anti-clerical church"!

There is a little circle at Moscow, where a Muscovite review, _La Balance_ (founded 1903), is the centre of the young men. V. Brusoff, a poet, is the editor. Balmont and Sologub write for its pages, as do Rosanow and Merejkowski. In 1898 there was a review started called _Mir Iskousstva_. Its director was Serge Diaghilev, and it endured until 1904. Sologub is one of the most promising poets. Block, Remisov, Ivanov are also poets of much ability. There are romancers such as Zensky, Kuzmin, Ivanov, Rops.h.i.+n, Chapygin, Serafimovitch, Zaitzeff, Volnoff; some of these wrote on risky themes. But when the works of these new writers are closely scrutinised their lack of originality and poverty of invention are noticeable.

The "poisonous honey" of French decadents and symbolists has attracted one party; and the others are being swallowed up in the pessimistic nebula of "mystic anarchy" and fatalism. "Russian pity" suffuses their work. There is without doubt a national sentiment and a revolt against western European culture, particularly the French. Russia for the Russians is the slogan of this group. But thus far nothing in particular has come of their patriotic efforts; no overwhelming personality has emerged from the rebellious froth of new theories. If ever the "man on horseback" does appear in Russia, it is very doubtful if he will bestride a Pegasus.

Of bigger and sterner calibre than any of the productions of the others is Sanine, a novel by Michael Artzibaschev, that is being widely read not only in Russia but in all the world. It was written as long ago as 1903 the author tells us. He is of Tartar origin, born 1878, of parents in whose veins flowed Russian, French, Georgian, and Polish blood. He is of humble origin, as is Gorky, and being of a consumptive tendency, he lives in the Crimea. He began as a journalist. His photograph reveals him as a young man of a fine, sensitive type, truly an apostle of pity and pain. He pa.s.sionately espouses the cause of the poor and downtrodden, as his extraordinary revolutionary short stories--The Millionaire among the rest--show.

Since Turgenieff's Fathers and Sons, no tale like Metal Worker Schevyrjow has appeared in European literature. In it the bedrock of Slavic fatalism, an anarchistic pessimism is reached. It has been done into French by Jacques Povolozky. The Russian author reveals plentiful traces of Tolstoy, Turgenieff, Dostoevsky, and Gorky in his pages; Tchekov, too, is not absent. But the new note is the influence of Max Stirner. Michael Artzibaschev calmly grafts the disparate ideas of Dostoevsky and Max Stirner in his Sanine, and the result is a hero who is at once a superman and a scoundrel--or are the two fairly synonymous? This clear-eyed, broad-shouldered Sanine pa.s.ses through the little town where he was born, leaving behind him a trail of mishaps and misfortunes. He is depicted with a marvellous art, though it is impossible to sympathise with him. He upsets a love-affair of his sister's, he quarrels with and insults her lover, who commits suicide; he also drives to self-destruction a wretched little Hebrew who has become a freethinker and can't stand the strain of his apostasy; he is the remote cause of another suicide, that of a weakling, a student full of "modern" ideas, but whose will is quite sapped. Turgenieff's Fathers and Sons is recalled more than once, especially the character of Bazarov, the nihilist. Furthermore, when this student fails to reap the benefit of a good girl's love, Sanine steps in and ruins her. Even incest is hinted at. All this sounds incredible in our bare recital, but in the flow and glow of the richly coloured narrative everything is plausible, nay, of the stuff of life.

As realists the Russians easily lead all other nations in fiction.

There are descriptions of woodlands that recall a little scene from Turgenieff's Sportsman's Sketches; there are episodes, such as the baccha.n.a.l in the monastery, a moonlit ride in the canoe with a realistic seduction episode, and the several quarrels that would have pleased both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; there is an old mujik who seems to have stepped out of Dostoevsky, yet is evidently a portrait taken from life. The weak mother, the pa.s.sionate sister, the sweet womanly quality of the deceived girl, these are portraits worthy of a master.

Sanine is not the Rogoszin, and his sister is not the Nastasia Philipovna, of Dostoevsky's The Idiot; for all that they are distinct and worthy additions to the vast picture-gallery of Russian fiction.

Sanine himself hardly appeals to our novel readers, for whom a golf-stick and a motor-car are symbols of the true hero. In a word, he is real flesh and blood. He goes as mysteriously as he came. The novel that followed, Breaking Point, is a lugubrious orgy of death and erotic madness, a symphony of suicide and love and the disgust of life. Artzibaschev is now in English garb. Thus far Sanine is his masterpiece.

V

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG

I

Two decades ago, more or less, John M. Robertson published several volumes chiefly concerned with the gentle art of criticism. Mr.

Robertson introduced to the English-reading world the critical theories of Emile Hennequin, whose essays on Poe, Dostoevsky, and Turgenieff may be remembered. It is a cardinal doctrine of Hennequin and Robertson that, as the personal element plays the chief role in everything the critic writes, he himself should be the first to submit to a grilling; in a word, to be put through his paces and tell us in advance of his likes and dislikes, his prejudices and pa.s.sions.

Naturally, it doesn't take long to discover the particular bias of a critic's mind. He writes himself down whenever he puts pen to paper.

For instance, there is the historic duel between Anatole France, a free-lance among critics, and Ferdinand Brunetiere, intrenched behind the bastions of tradition, not to mention the _Revue des Deux Mondes_.

That discussion, while amusing, was so much thres.h.i.+ng of academic straw. M. France disclaimed all authority--he, most erudite among critics; M. Brunetiere praised impersonality in criticism--he, the most personal among writers--not a pleasing or expansive personality, be it understood; but, narrow as he was, his personality shone out from every page.

Now, says Mr. Robertson, why not ask every critic about to bring forth an opinion for a sort of chart on which will be shown his various qualities of mind, character; yes, and even his physical temperament; whether sanguine or melancholic, bilious or eupeptic, young or old, peaceful or truculent; also his tastes in literature, art, music, politics, and religion. This reminds one of an old-fas.h.i.+oned game. And all this long-winded preamble is to tell you that the case of Arnold Schoenberg, musical anarchist, and an Austrian composer who has at once aroused the ire and admiration of musical Germany, demands just such a confession from a critic about to hold in the balance the music or unmusic (the Germans have such a handy word) of Schoenberg.

Therefore, before I attempt a critical or uncritical valuation of the art of Arnold Schoenberg let me make a clean breast of my prejudices in the manner suggested by Hennequin and Robertson. Besides, it is a holy and unwholesome idea to purge the mind every now and then.

First: I place pure music above impure, _i. e._, instrumental above mixed. I dislike grand opera as a miserable mishmash of styles, compromises, and arrant ugliness. The moment the human voice intrudes in an orchestral work, my dream-world of music vanishes. Mother Church is right in banis.h.i.+ng, from within the walls of her temples the female voice. The world, the flesh, and the devil lurk in the larynx of the soprano or alto, and her place is before the footlights, not as a vocal staircase to paradise. I say this, knowing in my heart that nothing is so thrilling as Tristan and Isolde, and my memory-cells hold marvellous pictures of Lilli Lehmann, Milka Ternina, and Olive Fremstad. So, I'm neither logical nor sincere; nevertheless, I maintain the opinion that absolute music, not programme, not music-drama, is the apogee of the art. A Beethoven string quartet holds more genuine music for me than the entire works of Wagner.

There's a prejudiced statement for you!

Second: I fear and dislike the music of Arnold Schoenberg, who may be called the Max Stirner of music. Now, the field being cleared, let us see what the music of the new man is like. Certainly, he is the hardest musical nut to crack of his generation, and the sh.e.l.l is very bitter in the mouth.

Early in December, 1912, the fourth performance of a curious composition by Schoenberg was given at the Choralionsaal in the Bellevuestra.s.se, Berlin. The work is ent.i.tled Lieder des Pierrot Lunaire, the text of which is a fairly good translation of a poem cycle by Albert Guiraud. This translation was made by the late Otto Erich Hartleben, himself a poet and dramatist. I have not read the original French verse, but the idea seems to be faithfully represented in the German version. This moon-stricken Pierrot chants--rather declaims--his woes and occasional joys to the music of the Viennese composer, whose score requires a reciter (female), a piano, flute (also piccolo), clarinet (also ba.s.s clarinet), violin (also viola), and violoncello. The piece is described as a melodrama. I listened to it on a Sunday morning, and I confess that Sunday at noon is not a time propitious to the mood musical. It was also the first time I had heard a note of Schoenberg's. In vain I had tried to get some of his scores; not even the six little piano pieces could I secure. Instead, my inquiries were met with dubious or pitying smiles--your music clerk is a terrible critic betimes, and his mind oft takes upon it the colour of his customer's orders. So there I was, to be pitched overboard into a new sea, to sink or float, and all the while wis.h.i.+ng myself miles away.

A lady of pleasing appearance, attired in a mollified Pierrot costume, stood before some j.a.panese screens and began to intone--to cantillate, would be a better expression. She told of a monstrous moon-drunken world, then she described Columbine, a dandy, a pale washer-woman--"Eine bla.s.se Wascherin wascht zur Nachtzeit bleiche Tucher"--and always with a refrain, for Guiraud employs the device to excess. A valse of Chopin followed, in verse, of course (poor suffering Frederic!), and part one--there are seven poems, each in three sections--ended with one ent.i.tled Madonna, and another, the Sick Moon. The musicians were concealed behind the screens (dear old Mark Twain would have said, to escape the outraged audience), but we heard them only too clearly!

It is the decomposition of the art, I thought, as I held myself in my seat. Of course, I meant decomposition of tones, as the slang of the ateliers goes.

What did I hear? At first, the sound of delicate china s.h.i.+vering into a thousand luminous fragments. In the welter of tonalities that bruised each other as they pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed, in the preliminary grip of enharmonics that almost made the ears bleed, the eyes water, the scalp to freeze, I could not get a central grip on myself. It was new music (or new exquisitely horrible sounds) with a vengeance. The very ecstasy of the hideous! I say "exquisitely horrible," for pain can be at once exquisite and horrible; consider toothache and its first cousin, neuralgia. And the border-land between pain and pleasure is a territory hitherto unexplored by musical composers. Wagner suggests poetic anguish; Schoenberg not only arouses the image of anguish, but he brings it home to his auditory in the most subjective way. You suffer the anguish with the fict.i.tious character in the poem. Your nerves--and remember the porches of the ears are the gateways to the brain and ganglionic centres--are literally pinched and sc.r.a.ped.

I wondered that morning if I were not in a nervous condition. I looked about me in the spa.r.s.ely filled hall. People didn't wriggle; perhaps their souls wriggled. They neither smiled nor wept. Yet on the wharf of h.e.l.l the lost souls disembarked and wept and lamented. What was the matter with my own ego? My conscience reported a clean bill of health, I had gone to bed early the previous night wis.h.i.+ng to prepare for the ordeal. Evidently I was out of condition (critics are like prize-fighters, they must keep in constant training else they go "stale"). Or was the music to blame? Schoenberg is, I said to myself, the crudest of all composers, for he mingles with his music sharp daggers at white heat, with which he pares away tiny slices of his victim's flesh. Anon he twists the knife in the fresh wound and you receive another horrible thrill, all the time wondering over the fate of the Lunar Pierrot and--hold on! Here's the first clew. If this new music is so distractingly atrocious what right has a listener to bother about Pierrot? What's Pierrot to him or he to Pierrot? Perhaps Schoenberg had caught his fish in the musical net he used, and what more did he want, or what more could his listeners expect?--for to be hooked or netted by the stronger volition of an artist is the object of all the seven arts.

How does Schoenberg do it? How does he pull off the trick? It is not a question to be lightly answered. In the first place the personality of the listener is bound to obtrude itself; dissociation from one's ego--if such a thing were possible--would be intellectual death; only by the clear, persistent image of ourselves do we exist--ba.n.a.l psychology as old as the hills. And the ear, like the eye, soon "accommodates" itself to new perspectives and unrelated harmonies.

I had felt, without clearly knowing the reason, that when Albertine Zehme so eloquently declaimed the lines of Madonna, the sixth stanza of part one, beginning "Steig, o Mutter aller Schmerzen, auf den Altar meiner Tone!" that the background of poignant noise supplied by the composer was more than apposite, and in the mood-key of the poem. The flute, ba.s.s clarinet, and violoncello were so cleverly handled that the colour of the doleful verse was enhanced, the mood expanded; perhaps the Hebraic strain in the composer's blood has endowed him with the gift of expressing sorrow and desolation and the abomination of living. How far are we here from the current notion that music is a consoler, is joy-breeding, or should, according to the Aristotelian formula, purge the soul through pity and terror. I felt the terror, but pity was absent. Blood-red clouds swept over vague horizons. It was a new land through which I wandered. And so it went on to the end, and I noted as we progressed that Schoenberg, despite his ugly sounds, was master of more than one mood; witness the shocking cynicism of the gallows song Die durre Dirne mit langen Halse. Such music is shameful--"and that's the precise effect I was after"--could the composer triumphantly answer, and he would be right. What kind of music is this, without melody, in the ordinary sense; without themes, yet every acorn of a phrase contrapuntally developed by an adept; without a harmony that does not smite the ears, lacerate, figuratively speaking, the ear-drums; keys forced into hateful marriage that are miles asunder, or else too closely related for aural matrimony; no form, that is, in the scholastic formal sense, and rhythms that are so persistently varied as to become monotonous--what kind of music, I repeat, is this that can paint a "crystal sigh," the blackness of prehistoric night, the abysm of a morbid soul, the man in the moon, the faint sweet odours of an impossible fairy-land, and the strut of the dandy from Bergamo? (See the Guiraud poem.) There is no melodic or harmonic line, only a series of points, dots, dashes, or phrases that sob and scream, despair, explode, exalt, blaspheme.

I give the conundrum the go-by; I only know that when I finally surrendered myself to the composer he worked his will on my fancy and on my raw nerves, and I followed the poems, loathing the music all the while, with intense interest. Indeed, I couldn't let go the skein of the story for fear that I might fall off somewhere into a gloomy chasm and be devoured by chromatic wolves. I recalled one extraordinary moment at the close of the composition when a simple major chord was sounded and how to my ears it had a supernal beauty; after the perilous tossing and pitching on a treacherous sea of no-harmonies it was like a field of firm ice under the feet.

I told myself that it served me right, that I was too old to go gallivanting around with this younger generation, that if I would eat p.r.i.c.kly musical pears I must not be surprised if I suffered from aural colic. Nevertheless, when certain of the Schoenberg compositions reached me from Vienna I eagerly fell to studying them. I saw then that he had adopted as his motto: Evil, be thou my good! And that a man who could portray in tone sheer ugliness with such crystal clearness is to be reckoned with in these topsyturvy times.

I have called Arnold Schoenberg a musical anarchist, using the word in its best estate--anarchos, without a head. Perhaps he is a superman also, and the world doesn't know it. His admirers and pupils think so, however, and several of them have recorded their opinion in a little book, published at Munich, 1912, by R. Piper & Co.

The life of Arnold Schoenberg, its outer side, has thus far been uneventful, though doubtless rich in the psychical sense. He is still young, born in Vienna, September 13, 1874. He lived there till 1901, then in the December of that year he went to Berlin, where he was for a short time conductor in Wolzogen's Bunten Theatre, and also teacher of composition at Stern's Conservatory. In 1903 he returned to Vienna, where he taught--he is pre-eminently a pedagogue, even pedantic as I hope to presently prove--in the K. K. Akademie fur Musik. In 1911 Berlin again beckoned to him, and as hope ever burns in the bosom of composers, young and old, he no doubt believes that his day will come.

Certainly, his disciples, few as they may be, make up by their enthusiasm for the public and critical flouting. I can't help recalling the Italian Futurists when I think of Schoenberg. The same wrath may be noted in the galleries where the young Italian painters exhibit. So it was at the end of the concert. One man, a sane person, was positively purple with rage (evidently he had paid for his seat), and swore that the composer was verruckt.

His compositions are not numerous. Schoenberg appears to be a reflective rather than a spontaneous creator. Here is an abridged list: Opus 1, 2, and 3 (composed, 1898-1900); Opus 4, string s.e.xtet, which bears the t.i.tle, Verklarte Nacht (1899); Gurrelieder, after J.

P. Jacobsen, for solos; chorus and orchestra (1900), published in the Universal Edition, Vienna; Opus 5, Pelleas et Melisande, symphonic poem for orchestra (1902), Universal Edition aforesaid; Opus 6, eight lieder (about 1905); Opus 7, E string quartet, D minor (1905); Opus 8, six orchestral lieder (1904); Opus 9, Kammersymphonie (1906); two ballads for voice and piano (1907); Peace on Earth, mixed chorus a capella (1908), ma.n.u.script; Opus 10, II, string quartet, F-sharp minor (1907-8); fifteen lieder, after Stefan George, a talented Viennese poet, one of the Jung-Wien group (1908), ma.n.u.script; Opus 11, three piano pieces (1908); five pieces for orchestra (1909) in the Peters Edition; monodrama, Erwartung (1909); Gluckliche Hand, drama with music, text by composer, not yet finished (1910); and six piano pieces (1911). His book on harmony appeared in 1910 and was universally treated as the production of a madman, and, finally, as far as this chronicle goes, in 1911-12 he finished Pierrot Lunaire, which was first produced in Berlin.