The Best Horrors by F. Marion Crawford. Francis Marion Crawford
by artificial means. Perhaps I am too sensitive—I hate blood. I detest commonplace, but I detest even more the furious contortions of ungoverned passion."
"But you cannot say that Wagner is exaggerated in his effects," argued Diana.
"No — they are well studied and the result is stupendous when they are properly reproduced. He is great — almost too great. He makes one realise the awful too vividly. He produces intoxication rather than pleasure. He is an egotist in art. He is determined that when you have heard him you shall not be able to listen to any one else, as a man who eats opium is disgusted with everything when he is awake. I believe there is a pitch in art at which pleasure becomes vicious; the limit certainly exists in sculpture and painting as well as in literature, just as when a man drinks too much wine he is drunk. The object of art is not to make life seem impossible, any more than the object of drinking wine is to lose one's senses. Art should nourish the mind, not drown it. To say that Wagner's own mind, and the minds of some of his followers were of such strong temper that nothing less than his music could excite them pleasurably, is not an answer. The Russian mujik will drink a pint of vodka in the early morning, and when he has drunk it he is gayer than the Italian who has taken a little cup of coffee. You would probably think his gaiety less refined than that of the Italian, though there is more of it. It will also be followed by a headache — but the headache, the moral headache after an orgy of modern art is worse than the headache from too much vodka. It is like Heine's 'toothache in the heart.' He used to say that the best filling for that was of lead and a certain powder invented by Berthold Schwarz. Romantism can go too far, like everything else. The Hermes of Olympia was descended from a clumsy but royal race of Egyptian granite blocks; but he is the historical ancestor of the vilest productions of modern sculpture. Modern art is drunk — drunk with the delight of expressing excessively what should not be expressed at all, drunk with the indulgence of the senses until the intellect is clouded and dull, or spasmodically frantic by turns, drunk with the vulgar self-satisfied vanity of a village coxcomb. Ah, for Art's sake let poor art be kept sober until the heaven-born muses deign to pay us another visit!"
"Amen ! " exclaimed Heine, devoutly. " The same things are true of literature. But I admire Wagner, nevertheless, though his music terrifies me. I think Mozart was the Raphael, Wagner the Michelangelo of the opera. Any one may choose between the two, for it is a matter of taste. But in music the development from the one to the other seems to me more rational than it has been in literature."
"How do you mean ? " asked Gwendoline.
"I think music has advanced better than literature. They were both little boys once, but the one has grown into a great, dominating, royal giant — the other into a greedy, snivelling, dirty-nosed, foulmouthed, cowardly ruffian. There are bad musicians and good writers, of course. The bad musicians do little harm, but the good writers occupy the position of Lot in the condemned cities — they are the mourners at the funeral of romance. The mass of fiction makers to-day are but rioters at the baptismal feast of Realism, the Impure."
"What a sweeping condemnation!" exclaimed Augustus. " I thought that you yourself were a supporter of realism, or declared yourself to be, though your lyrics are certainly very romantic."
"I was the renegade monk from the monastery of the romantists," said Heine. "A Frenchman once told me so. But when I grew old and married, I hankered for the dear old atmosphere, and my little French wife helped me to breathe it again."
"Our great modern realist, Ernest Renan, says of himself, half regretfully, that he feels like a religieux manque" said Augustus.
"I can understand that," answered Heine. " But when I was young the word romance stunk in my nostrils. It meant Platen."
"And what does it mean to you now?" inquired Gwendoline, who wanted to lead the dead poet back to the point.
" You would have a definition, madam ?" he replied. " Romance is a beautiful woman, with a dead pale skin, and starry eyes and streaming raven hair, and when I look into her sweet dark face I could wear a ton of armour on my back and cleave a Saracen to the chine with my huge blade for her sake, or go barefoot to Jerusalem, or even read Platen's poetry all through. But she looks so strangely at me with her great black eyes, that I am never quite sure whether she is quite real and quite serious. I only know that she is very, very beautiful, and that I love her to distraction."
"That is a definition from fairyland," said Chopin with his soft sweet smile.
"And you want one from the library of a student, I suppose," answered Heine. "Romance is the modern epic. I forget who said so, but it is true in a limited way. The romantic languages were those Latin tongues which were not Latin, but Berlinish."
"In other words — slang," suggested Augustus.
"Slang — exactly. Latinus grossus qui facit tremare pilastros, as the Roman schoolboy calls it —"
"Please translate ! " exclaimed Lady Brenda.
"If it means anything it means the Romantic dialect — a coarse rough Latin that would make columns shake. The words are not all in the dictionary, madam, but metaphorically they are in most people's mouths. It afterwards became the most elegant language of its age and has given the name of romance to the school of literature it founded. The first romantic writings were in that language — the love-songs of the troubadours, and I have seen in an old library in Siena a very beautiful manuscript collection of them with the original music and words by Jehan Bretel."
"What were they like?" asked Gwendoline, eagerly.
"I can remember a stanza or two:
"Mi chant sont tout plain d'ire et de douleur
Pour vous dame ke je ai tant aimee
Que je ne sal se je chant u se pleur
Ainsi m'estant souffrir ma destinee
Mais se Dieu plaist encor verrai le jour
Kamour sera cangie en autre tour
Si vous donra envers moi millo r pensee
Chanson vatent garde ne remanoir
Prie celi ki plus jaime pour ke souvent par li soiez cantee.
"The spelling is very curious, but the sentiment is unmistakable and the language is Provencal. There is the origin of romance in the Romansch language. Those songs preserved the customs of those times, the troubadour with his lute below the castle wall, the obdurate lady behind the lattice in her tower, the life-and-death seriousness of love in the eleventh century — it is all there, and we call it romance. The literature of love-songs continued to spread after the customs of those days had passed away, but it did not move with the times, though it increased. The knight in armour, the lute, and the lady with her scarf were preserved like curious zoological specimens in spirits, and are the foundation of all romance. Then we had Germans and Englishmen who wrote long epic romances in other languages, such as Wolfram von Eschenbach and Sir Thomas Malory, who got his Morte d 'Arthur from the French. A modern poet owes much of his fame to his treatment of the same theme, which shows that the subject is not even yet worn out. But though the old songs still stir us, they are not enough for us nowadays. The frantic fighting, the melancholy tragedy, the black-and-white magic which appealed to the imagination of a Black Forest freebooting baron of the tenth century, do not appeal to ours. The French pastoral romances were an attempt to change the form of the solemn chivalric epic of earlier times into something lighter and more gay. But unlike the chivalric epic the pastoral had no foundation in real life and consequently disappeared almost without a trace. The modern romantic novel is a prose epic, generally founded on modern life."
"And what is the modern realistic novel?" asked Diana.
"It is the prose without the epic," answered the poet. "It is therefore the opposite of romance in every respect. It sets aside all invention, and takes for its standpoint the principle that a hero is not necessary to a story, and that every-day life, with such episodes as it may chance to bring forth, should be of sufficient interest to everybody, to make everybody ready to dispense for ever with imagination. The realists say that a man may learn more from being shown what he is than from being told what he should