Martin Schüler
By . New York: Henry Holt & Company. 1919. 12mo. iv + 313 pp. $1.50.
THIS is understood to be a first novel by an Englishwoman; and it has enough distinction to give its author an indisputable place in a group of Englishwomen whose first pieces of fiction have recently made them known to connoisseurs on both sides of the Atlantic— Rebecca West (The Return of the Soldier), Clemence Dane (Regiment of Women), E. M. Delafield (Zella Sees Herself), and Dorothy Richardson (Pilgrimage). The theme of Martin Schüler, however, sets its author somewhat apart from this group; for, whereas the others have written the tragi-comedy of limitations, mostly feminine, Homer Wilson writes of nothing less than a surprising volte-face in a man of genius. Her subject is that æsthetic equivalent of religious conversion by which a creative musician betook himself from the husks which the swine did eat—in this instance, facile and pot-boiling light operas—and returned to his father’s house, sinking the last years of his short life in the completion of a music-drama which he had first conceived as a youth. His career is traced from his earliest amateur successes in Heidelberg to the beginning of his public achievements in Leipsic; thence to his brilliant triumphs in Berlin; thence, by way of bis revolt against the cheapening of himself, to a villa in the Black Forest, where he spends the next years in a fury of creative ardor. He emerges with his magnum opus, sees it through preparation for the stage, hears the first performance, and dies on the closing cadence — as though every tissue of his body were tenaciously aware of having existed for one end only, which, when it comes, is literally the end of everything.
What most inspires respect for this novel is the singleness with which the author focuses her attention on the complications of one kind of genius, refusing to be drawn into any other complications. The setting is Germany immediately before the war, and the personae, men and women alike, are nothing if not German. Yet Schüler’s struggle for his identity is precisely the conflict of artist against bourgeoisie, plutocracy, and himself, in any land or time, and it has less than nothing to do with any sort of patriotism or propaganda. Still more creditably, it has nothing to do with any sort of moralistic argument. Martin Schüler, gross, concupiscent, egoistic, faithless, mercenary, in some ways Teutonically obtuse, in no human way very admirable, is simply a young man who has little ability to care more than a hour at a time for anything except the fulfillment of his inexplicable need to create one special kind of beauty. This need is the beginning and the end of him. What precipitates his revolt is no fine abstraction, but the infuriating sound of a hurdy-gurdy paying its crude respects to the catchiest of his tunes, it is toward his art alone that his life is revolutionized. But mark: his art is to him what truth is to the philosopher, dialectic to the logician, law to the jurist, God to the mystic. Thus genius, now and always — but the truth about it is not too commonly told. W. F.