Better Than the Best

Who of us has not known that type of man which is never content to like that best which by a general consensus of opinion is so labeled, but must ever seek out the unknown, and place it on a pedestal that o’ertops all others as the Sphinx o’ertops a plaster cast of it ?

Now I love that spirit of enthusiasm and open-mindedness that is willing to believe that there are giants in these days. Giants there have always been and giants there will always be, but the type of man of which I write never by any chance picks out the one in whom you yourself have confidence; he never picks out a fellow American either, — it is almost always a Russian, or a Dane, or a Pole, of whom you have never heard, and so great are his powers of dogmatic utterance, and so magnetic his personality, that he makes you believe his belief — while you are with him.

Drop into his rooms some sunny afternoon, feeling that you are progressive and ever young in your own enthusiasms, and in five minutes’ time he will cover you with cobwebs, and make you feel that you are a superannuated mossback.

By way of opening the conversation make some chance reference to Shakespeare and the delight that you have lately had from seeing Twelfth Night adequately played.

His lip will curl and he will say, —

“My dear fellow, Shakespeare is all very well for the ordinary mind; indeed, I ’ll go so far as to say that some very cultivated people find much to admire in him, but when I want to hear the last word in drama I go to the unpublished works of Ivan Stepnovitch. They are dramas that will not act and were not meant to act, and that, after all, is the highest form of dramatic art. I want meat, not milk for babes.”

Already you are beginning to feel that Shakespeare is pretty soppy mental pabulum, and you wonder that you have never heard of Stepnovitch. But I think that if our friend felt that his opinion had already been shared by others he would cease to hold it himself.

“Drama that will act,” he continues, “is easy. Any one can write it. Clyde Fitch gives us plays that will act, but I do not place him even alongside Shakespeare. The real master, however, is the man who writes us plays that were never intended to be acted, and that could not be acted, and yet seem so real as we read them that we can imagine the greatest actors in the world playing the various parts. That’s what happens when I read Stepnovitch, a Russian who is as much greater than Tolstoy as Tolstoy is greater than Howells.”

It is the same in the arts. You say something about the perpetual strength, the eternal beauty revealed in the statues of Michael Angelo, and our friend shakes his head, elevates his eyebrows, sighs prodigiously, and says, —

“My dear man, we of the future are away past Michelangelo [note his form of the name]. Michelangelo was possessed of a certain power, and at his best there is a charm in his work that still lingers, and I admit that his influence in the art world has been wholly good, but we of to-day need not look to Michelangelo when we can revel in the work of that godlike sculptor, Edouard Petrovitski.”

You tell him that you never heard of Petrovitski, and he looks at you with holy compassion for a moment, and then he says, —

“My dear fellow, why do you try to give your opinion of Michelangelo when you admit that you have never even heard of Petrovitski ? ”

“Is he alive to-day?” you ask.

“No. He died forty years ago in Warsaw, and all of his works were destroyed by the Russian government because they were too revolutionary; but luckily for posterity photographs were taken of them, very poor ones, but still sufficient to place Petrovitski on a pinnacle that makes the height of poor Michelangelo seem like a depression.”

You know that when you get out into the light of day your old ideas will reassert themselves, and you will once more love Michael Angelo’s work, but just now you feel that he is not much better than the sculptor who did the atrocious statue of “Sunset” Cox that has been retired temporarily from its scarecrow position in Astor Place.

Your friend, with real eloquence, shows you how “Michelangelo” has no chance to run in the same class with this Titanic Pole, and you find yourself sneering at the veneer of culture that could find so much to praise in the Italian sculptor.

Your friend is an all round man. It is not alone in literature and sculpture that he is fully awake, and taking special notice; in the field of landscape art he is not only abreast of the times, but several decades ahead of them.

Perhaps you yourself feel that in art matters you are very much alive and open to the impressions of to-day, and so you say to him with all the confidence of a man who expects to be supported in his opinion, that, much as this country has been decried by Europeans as a dollarloving land, we are yet advancing to the front in at least one of the arts, and that the best exponents of landscape art today are Americans, — that France already knows this, and that America is beginning to realize it.

“I’m sorry I can’t agree with you,” says he, and once more the lip curls gracefully (he must put it up in curl papers). “From the time of Lorraine and Poussin, up through the English and French schools to the modern American, there has never been a school that really produced an art creation in landscape fit to cause enthusiasm in a really thinking man, a man who appreciates his Stepnovitch in literature, and his Petrovitski in sculpture. The only superlatively imaginative and poetic, and yet absolutely truthful landscapes that have ever been painted are those of Eric Finsen.”

You gasp and ask him who Eric Finsen may be.

Again that holy smile that pardons all your lack of knowledge of the really necessary, and then he tells you that Eric Finsen is a Finnish fisherman, or perhaps a Danish carpenter, who only paints on Sundays, and that his work is known only to an inner circle of appreciative souls, but that by it Corot and Turner and Millet and Constable and Israels and Inness and Wyant and Rousseau become mere Christmas card-makers.

Once more — in his presence — you see how fatuous you have been really to like anything in American art, or the school of 1830, or the Englishmen; and you feel, without having seen anything of Finsen’s work, that he alone of all painters has struck the true note, and that future painters had better try some other profession, as Finsen has already distanced them.

And speaking of true notes, let us sound our friend on composers, — for he is nothing if not musical, and ten years ago he felt so mortally tired of orchestral music, as utterly inadequate to express the thoughts that arose in him, that he now never attends a concert of any sort, preferring to read the music scores in his own room, and thus getting an absolutely perfect representation of the master work of master minds.

You ask him whether in naming the three great composers of all time he would include Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner, or whether he would leave out Bach and put in Richard Strauss (Strauss is really a sop to him).

“Oh, how puerile a selection! Why mention any of those three ? Bach I might allow to remain for historical reasons, but Beethoven and Wagner I left behind me ages ago, and Richard Strauss, — the main fault that I find with Richard Strauss is that he is so old-fashioned, so hopelessly melodic and conventional. Till Eulenspiegel is a tune to be whistled by kindergartners,

“No, if you want the music of the future, the real thing, the last word for all time in music, get the scores — if you can, they are not published in this country — of Johann Rübernek of Prague, a youngman not yet twenty-five, but already past master of orchestra of the future. He has invented six instruments for the purpose of making sounds that hitherto never existed, and when I read his scores all else in music seems banality. Rubernek is the finis in music.”

It is time to reel out, and you do so, and find the old-fashioned sun still shining, and a piano organ is playing a “crudity” from Aïda, and you rejoice in it. You go up to the park, and look at St. Gaudens’s statue of Sherman, and you actually like it, and feel that in spite of the photographs of Petrovitski’s statues St. Gaudens is among the immortals. Then you go to the Metropolitan Museum and you dare to drink in the everlasting beauty of one of Inness’s dreams of God’s country, and in the evening you venture to like a performance of one of Shakespeare’s “attempts” at the drama, and you thank God that you never before heard of Stepnovitch, Petrovitski, Pinsen, or Rübernek.

But, nevertheless, you have a sneaking feeling that your friend represents the creme de la crême of culture. Dogmatism, great is thy power!