journalist or B who lives in the Albany. But where contemporary fiction is concerned, though there have been novelists whose brains generated purely invented people as well as derivative people, it is an immense aid, whatever sort of person is being described, to bear (at the start at all events) a particular human being in mind. But it is an obligation on the man who does this to disguise his character beyond recognition where there is the least possibility of offense: unless his whole purpose be offense. There have been in our day a great many novels in which men and women one knew, or knew about, have appeared with no attempt at disguise: sometimes with every effort to insure identification. There are living politicians, painters, authors who are known to many people only through their alleged portraits in books. Novelists have contracted so habitually the custom of making things easy for themselves and securing a cheap pungency by drawing on their knowledge of Mr. Snook, R.A., Sir John Pigment, or Lady Jane Dolt, that many readers when they get a new novel of the mœurs contemporaines kind, ask as they meet each fresh character, 'I wonder who this is meant for?' We continually find, within a week of a new novel's appearance, a rumor running round London to the effect that So-and-so is in it to the life or that So-and-so gets it hot. This in fiction is not the game, and the more realistic and convincing the fiction the worse it is. A man is introduced: his face, clothes, house, family, profession, achievements are precisely described; his gestures and the very accents of his voice are reproduced; and he is carried through a series of actions of which some are totally fictitious and others are copied from actions he is known to have performed. This is un pardonable: it is simply telling lies about a real person, lies which, if they sound likely enough, may cause not merely pain but serious practical embarrassment. For me I should, I freely confess, be hurt if a friend, and annoyed if anybody else, set me truthfully down without imputing to without imputing to me anything false. I should be furious if I were, in a recognizable way, described and represented as doing things, obviously piggish or merely not to my taste, which a stranger or an acquaintance might pardonably suppose that I had done. The one sort of work in which I, or any man, need not mind being described, however accurately, and carried through actions, however unlikely, is a thoroughgoing shocker. Much as I should loathe appearing 'under a thin disguise' as seducing somebody or indulging in wholesale backbiting (things not uncommon and liable to be believed of any man to whom they are imputed), I should not mind in the least if a novelist painted me as vividly as possible, made identification certain, even spelled my name backward, or even spelled it forward, if he made his story obviously false. He could take me and do what he liked with me: make me emulate the hero of the Brides in Bath story, run a baby farm, blow up the Houses of Parliament, or accumulate a fortune by burglary or the abstraction of pennies from blind men's tins. These crimes are not merely crimes that I have not committed and have not (I most earnestly assure you) any intention of committing; but they are crimes which nobody who knew of my existence (and the others are not in question) would suppose me to have committed. Murders and highway robberies galore may be saddled upon my counterfeit presentment: I shall not merely not mind, but I shall (so strange is the constitution of the human mind) be openly pleased. But the deeds that I might conceivably commit and don't: from the suggestion of these God save me, and us all. It does not matter being the subject of a fairy tale, but it is most disagreeable to be the subject of scandalous gossip. [The Saturday Review] THE UNEARTHLY NOTE IN MODERN MUSIC THE latest thing in the musical ear of London is a Lyrical Symphonic Poem by Georges D'Orlay entitled 'Flamma Artis.' Mr. Albert Coates Mr. Albert Coates conducted the London Symphony Orchestra through it on a recent Monday evening very creditably. It was obviously not his fault that we seldom heard the unfortunate lady who declaimed the vocal part. It was clearly the composer's intention that she should not be heard. He decreed that she should be there mainly to add to the general disturbance when occasion required a more than usually supreme effort. She was part of the composer's symphonic outfit, which, so far as we could gather from a first hearing, Mr. Coates handled with great intelligence and presence of mind. He enabled us to appreciate the work with unusual accuracy owing to the incisive way in which he emphasized the leading ideas and prevented his players from taking any advantage of the fact that the music was new. He allowed us no reason to suppose that we shall think more highly of 'Flamma Artis' when we come to know it better. We are going to dwell upon one characteristic only of this Lyrical Symphony to the exclusion of the rest, because it is a characteristic common to much modern music. The flames of life, so monotonously invoked in this poem, are eldritch flames, the emo tions are unearthly, the forms that rise are spectral. We feel continually that this is the kind of music which might be written by a planchette. It is music for spooks and witches or anyone who has been thoroughly and successfully disembodied. Here we touch upon an element in modern music which would doubtless repay careful investigation by critics and philosophers. Why are modern musicians most happy when they are setting to music metaphysics which they do not wholly understand? Why do they so often choose to deal either with abstractions or with emotions and adventures beyond experience? Why must modern musicians be so often preternatural, remote, grotesque, abnormal, almost anything but plain human? Why does Scriabin theosophize? Why does Debussy bury his cathedral before writing about it, and why when he wants a half-holiday does he take it in the form of an elephant? Why does Strauss speak through Zarathustra and cry with the voice of Electra? And why does the whole texture of modern music, even when it professes to utter ordinary human feelings, shine and shimmer with lights and colors not of this world? Why has so much of it a tang which belongs to no fruit ever gathered from an earthy garden? Why is so much modern music either diabolian or ethereal? Somebody said of Berlioz's music in Faust, that it smelled of brimstone. Modern music often smells worse than that. If pain had a smell, it would smell like some of our modern music, and if this music had a taste, it would taste like mustard pickles clamoring in vain for their wholesome complement of cold roast beef. Or there is another sort which smells and tastes like water from the crystal sea in the Apocalypse. In a word, the most common quality of modern music is to be unearthly, to be above, below, or against nature, but rarely to be natural. It can be no mere accident of fashion that musicians today delight in muted instruments. The use of the mute is only significant as giving a mysterious or unnatural turn to a familiar voice. It is equally no accident that musicians delight in the harp, which at once brings in a remote and ethereal note, or the trombone which is seldom of this world. It is not caprice merely that modern composers should be continually trying to find combinations of instruments that are strange and scales that are unprecedented in our ears. These are the outward signs of an inward tendency. The impulse is strong in modern music to express the supernatural, to lead the imagination into regions where it may shape its beauties and horrors in a void. The explanation has yet to be found. Partly, perhaps, our musicians obey the general movement of the time away from the elementary materialism in science, art, and philosophy which satisfied the advanced thinkers of fifty years ago. There is a parallel movement toward a new kind of mysticism today in science, art, religion, and philosophy, and music follows with the rest. We should expect the reaction against realism to be stronger in music than in any other human activity, for the whole principle and practice of realism is contrary to music. It is significant that the man who did most to bring music into touch with common incident, who made it treat, so to speak, of bed and board, suffered from this reaction as much as anybody. Strauss flies from his baby and the striking clocks to the backward and abysm of time (as in Zarathustra) or to the sublimities of an unearthly transfiguration (as in Tod and Verklaung). His music shows us very clearly the pretty pickle into which the time modern composers have been led. Having set music to paint landscapes, to argue philosophies, to depict character and to chronicle incidents, the time inevitably came when they yearned to escape from this self-inflicted bondage. Some ride off on a broomstick, others flap their wings ineffectually in a metaphysical void, some simply get as far away as possible from ordinary human ideas and emotions. In reaction from Strauss's bathroom they fly from the earth altogether. The function of music is to express emotions more directly and at the same time more universally than is possible in any other medium. Music presents us 'with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls' in a way that has never been explained, though many philosophers have had a try at it. Of late this function has been either repudiated or obscured. Music has ceased to be a mistress in her own house and has become a general servant to the sister arts. For a generation an attempt has been made to make music express objects and ideas which can be better expressed in literature and painting. Music, which by its nature is direct and universal, is thus forced to be indirect and specific. Where once we were content to receive the Fifth Symphony as a direct and universal utterance, whose directness and universality would be destroyed by any attempt to translate it into words, to-day we are confronted with poems and programmes which have to be read in close association with the music which they limit and embarrass at every turn. The musicians, poor fellows, feel there is something wrong. Hence their liking for poems they do not understand and their quaint excursions into transcendental philosophy. A com poser is less likely to be limited by a poem which means nothing or by a theosophy which may mean anything. Is it not possible that music has become inhuman because it has tried to be all too human? Beethoven is universal, but he is thoroughly human. Georges d'Orlay is specific, but the thing he specifies is like nothing on this earth. The reaction in modern music seems to have taken the wrong direction. It should have reacted against a servile specification of the things that interest humanity. It has reacted instead against humanity itself. Bach wrote music for a cathedral. His realist successors tried to describe the bishop. The more modern musician revenges himself on the bishop by drowning his cathedral under the sea. Or is it that music is actually leading us to altogether new lines and levels of thought? Are our musicians secretly determined that music shall not be distanced by the higher mathematics in generalizing the universe? We have much the same feeling when listening to Scriabin as when listening to Professor Eddington. Perhaps, unknown to us of grosser perception, our modern musicians already move in the time-space which is still an eerie habitation for persons of common clay. For ourselves, we are content to end roughly where we began and to renew our original question: Why on earth should so much of our modern music be unearthly? [To-day] AN ESSAY ON EYES BY CLAUDE TESSIER 'READER, I have no ear!' Thus Elia in the beginning of his famous chapter. But I write of eyes; and, reader, I have an eye an eye for other eyes. Of which there are three kinds - human eyes, animal eyes, and inanimate eyes. By the last I mean the eyes of things such as the succulent potato and the needle. Let profiteers remember the latter; for are we not told that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven? Surely this should prick the conscience of the war-wealthy. Bull's eyes have variable functions in our commonwealth. Some have an incurable aversion to red; others disturb the tranquillity of thieves, lovers, and tramps on dark nights; another kind brings fame to sportsmen and our soldiers at their musketry course; while mothers thank the gods for that round, striped, sticky variety which solaces the heart and quietens the tongue of the innocent child. Horses, cats, dogs, fauns, owls, and fowls all have characteristic eyes, for which the novelist is duly thankful. We have all met in our fiction the maiden with the fawn-like eyes and the jealous sister with orbs of stealthy felinity, and the bad girl of the family who is often affected with a nasty squint to add to her burdens. Becky Sharp had cat's eyes, I am sure; and does not R. L. S. in one flash-phrase illumine the engaging personality of the versatile Jim Pinkerton by telling us that 'his eye was active as a fowl's'? Whenever I gaze into the eyes of a horse I feel sad. Something in those liquid depths speaks to me of long, long years of labor, of innumerable loads drawn endlessly along rutty roads, of patient obedience, assisted by a whipthong, to masters good and bad; and then I am depressed, for I do not like to be reminded of toil, and my rebellious spirit snorts at the thought of patient obedience to masters good and bad. And now we come to human eyes. Old and young, dim and sparkling, gray, green, hazel, brown, blue, and black (two varieties), fat eyes, bulging and deep-set, round and narrow, so I might go on. But I am not a cataloguer trying to do for eyes what Galton did for finger-prints. Science has not yet half exploited the possibilities of the human eye; she has let Sister Art cultivate almost exclusively this fair field of God's creation. The painters have done well, and so have the authors. Even sculptors do their best, yet there is always something lacking in even the finest statuary. Think of those cold, white figures of Alexander the Great and Julius Cæsar could they be endowed with the fire that once flamed from the living eye! Speculations on the lost arms of the Venus of Milo are legion, but I wonder about her eyes; for the eyes of a beautiful woman are as full of mystery and significance of all the deepest secrets of Nature and the divine handiwork of God as the stars in the universe. Did not rare Ben Jonson sing to his love: Drink to me only with thine eyes, And that was saying something in VOL. 17-NO. 884 The poet's eye, 'in fine frenzy rolling'; the scholar's eye, that patient, tired gaze of the mighty reader of books, having a charm all its own; the 'glad eye,' so popular in flapperdom; the weak, fixed stare of the spiritualist and reforming visionary. These are a few everyday types. Then there is the eye of "The Ancient Mariner,' which was of such mesmeric power that the wedding guest, despite the lure of the music, the minstrelsy, and the merry meal, sat on a cold stone while the skinny old sea-dog expatiated on how he shot the albatross, and the consequences thereof. We kiss with our lips, but, after all, love is more concerned with the-eyes. Think of our popular songs -"Two Eyes of Gray,' 'Could You Be True to Eyes of Blue?' and so on. A song writer knows the symbol of the old, old story, and he reaches the heart of the people through the eye. Lewis Carroll, who loved children, wrote thus of one of his favorites: Child of the pure unclouded brow, Could he have limned better the sweetness of childhood than by speaking of those dreaming eyes of wonder? I think not. In that marvelous volume produced by two old Germans for the perennial delight of world-wide infancy, Grimm's Fairy Tales, there is a pretty story called 'One Eye, Two Eyes, Three Eyes,' that laid hold of my childish imagination with a grip which I have never been able wholly to shake off. It tells how but you know the story? If not, stop the first child whom you meet coming out of school, and ask for the tale of 'Little TwoEyes,' then you will understand the power of the eye in the mythology of the human race. Polyphemus possessed only one eye in the middle of his forehead, so, in |