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<h2>CHAPTER XX</h2> <h2>A SYNTHESIS OF THE SEVEN ARTS</h2> Nothing new in all this talk about a fusion of the Seven Arts; it has been tried for centuries. Richard Wagner's attempt just grazed success, though the æsthetic principle at the base of his theory is eminently unsound. Pictures, sculpture, tone, acting, poetry, and the rest are to be found in the Wagnerian music-drama; but the very titles are significant—a hybrid art is there. With Wagner music is the master. His poetry, his drama, are not so important, though his scenic sense is unfailing. Every one of his works delights the eye; truly moving pictures. Yet if the lips of the young man of Urbino had opened to music, they would have sung the melodies of the young man of Salzburg. Years ago Sadikichi Hartmann, the Japanese poet from Hamburg, made a bold attempt in this direction, adding to other ingredients of the sensuous stew, perfume. The affair came off at Carnegie Hall, and we were wafted on the wings of song and smell to Japan—only I detected the familiar odour of old shoes and the scent of armpits—of the latter Walt Whitman has triumphantly sung. A New York [Pg 219] audience is not as pleasant to the nostrils as a Japanese crowd. That Mr. Finck has assured us. In the Théâtre d'art, Paris, and in the last decade of the last century, experiments were made with all the arts—except the art of the palate. Recently, Mary Hallock, a Philadelphia pianist, has invented a mixture of music, lights, and costumes; for instance, in a certain Debussy piece, the stage assumes a deep violet hue, which glides into a light purple. The Turkish March of Mozart is depicted in deep "reds, yellows, and greens." Philip Hale, the Boston music-critic, has written learnedly on the relation of tones and colours, and that astonishing poet, Arthur Rimbaud, in his Alchimie du Verbe, tells us: "I believe in all the enchantments. I invented the colour of the vowels: A, black; E, white; I, red; O, blue; U, green." This scheme he set forth in his famous sonnet, Voyelles, which was only a mystification to catch the ears of credulous ones. René de Ghil invented an entirely new system of prosody, which no one understood; least of all, the poet. I wrote a story, The Piper of Dreams (in Melomaniacs), to prove that music and the violet rays combined might prove deadly in the hands of an anarch composer like Illowski—or Richard Strauss. And now New York has enjoyed its first Light Symphony, by Alexander Scriabine. It was played by the Russian Symphony Orchestra under the suave conductorship of Modeste Altschuler (who is so Jacobean), while [Pg 220] his brother Jacob (who is so modest) sat at the keyboard and pressed down the keys which regulated the various tintings on a screen; a wholly superfluous proceeding, as the colours did not mollify the truculence of the score; indeed, were quite meaningless, though not optically unpleasant. I admired this Russian, Scriabine, ever since I heard Josef Hofmann play a piano of his étude in D sharp minor. Chopinesque, very, but a decided personality was also shown in it. I've heard few of his larger orchestral works. Nevertheless, I did not find Prometheus as difficult of comprehension as either Schoenberg or Ornstein. Judged purely on the scheme set by its composer, I confess I enjoyed its chaotic beauties and passionate twaddle, and singular to relate, the music was best when it recalled Wagner and Chopin (a piano part occasionally sounded bilious premonitions of Chopin). But, for such a mighty theme as Prometheus, the Light-Bringer (a prehistoric Ben Franklin without his electrified kite), the leading motives of this new music were often undersized. The dissociation of conventional keys was rigorously practised, and at times we were in the profoundest gulfs of cacophony. But the scoring evoked many novel effects; principally, Berlioz and vodka. I still think Scriabine a remarkable composer, if not much addicted to the languishing Lydian mode. But his Light Symphony proved to be only a partial solution of the problem. In [Pg 221] Paris the poet Haraucourt and Ernest Eckstein invented puppet-shows with perfume symphonies. A quarter of a century ago I visited the Théâtre d'art, in Paris; that is, my astral soul did, for in those times I was a confirmed theosophist. The day had been a stupid one in Gotham, and I hadn't enough temperament to light a cigarette, so I simply pressed the nombril button, took my Rig-Veda—a sacred buggy—projected my astral being, and sailed through space to the French capital, there to enjoy a bath in the new art, or synthesis of the seven arts, eating included. As it was a first performance, even the police were deprived of their press-tickets, and the deepest mystery was maintained by the experimenters. I found the theatre, soon after my arrival, plunged into an orange gloom, punctured by tiny balls of violet light, which daintily and intermittently blinked. The dominant odour of the atmosphere was Cologne-water, with a florid counterpoint that recalled bacon and eggs, a mélange that appealed to my nostrils; and, though at first it seems hardly possible that the two dissimilar odours could even be made to modulate and merge, yet I had not been indoors ten minutes before the subtlety of the duet was apparent. Bacon has a delicious smell, and, like a freshly cut lemon, it causes a premonitory tickling of the palate and little rills of hunger in one's stomach. "Aha!" I cried [Pg 222] (astrally, of course), "this is a concatenation of the senses never dreamed of by Plato when he conceived the plan of his Republic." The lanquid lisp of those assembled in the theatre drifted into little sighs, and then a low, long-drawn-out chord in B flat minor, scored for octoroons, octopuses, shofars, tympani, and piccolo, sounded. Immediately a chorus of male soprani blended with this chord, though they sang the common chord of A major. The effect was one of vividity (we say "avidity," why can't we say "vividity"?); it was a dissonance, pianissimo, and it jarred my ears in a way that made their drums warble. Then a low burbling sound ascended. "The bacon frying," I cried, but I was mistaken. It was caused by the hissing of a sheet of carmilion (that is carmine and vermilion) smoke which slowly upraised on the stage; as it melted away the lights in the auditorium turned green and topaz, and an odour of jasmine and stewed tomatoes encircled us. My immediate neighbours seemed to be swooning; they were nearly prostrate, with their lips glued to the rod that ran around the seats. I grasped it, and received a most delicious thrill, probably electrical in origin, though it was velvety pleasure merely to touch it, and the palms of my hands exquisitely ached. "The tactile motive," I said. As I touched the rod I noted a small mouthpiece, and thinking I might hear something, I applied my ear; it instantly became wet. So [Pg 223] evidently it was not the use to which it should be put. Again inspecting this mouthpiece, I put my finger to it and cautiously raised the moist end to my lips. "Heavenly!" I murmured. What sort of an earthly paradise was I in? And then losing no time, I placed my astral lips to the orifice, and took a long pull. Gorgeous was the result. Gumbo soup, as sure as I ever ate it, not your pusillanimous New York variety, but the genuine okra soup that one can't find outside of Louisiana, where old negro mammies used to make it to perfection. "The soup motive," I exclaimed. Just as I gurgled the gumbo nocturne down my thirsty throat, a shrill burst of brazen clangour (this is not tautological) in the orchestra roused me from my dream, and I gazed on the stage. The steam had cleared away, and now showed a rocky and wooded scene, the trees sky-blue, the rocks a Nile-green. The band was playing something that sounded like a strabismic version of the prelude to Tristan. But strange odour-harmonies disturbed my enjoyment of the music, for so subtly allied were the senses in this new temple of art that a separate smell, taste, touch, vision, or sound jarred the ensemble. This uncanny interfusion of the arts took my breath away, but, full of gumbo soup as I was—and you have no idea how soup discommodes the astral stomach—I was anchored to my seat, and bravely determined not to leave till I had some [Pg 224] clew to the riddle of the new evangel of the seven—or seventeen—arts. The stage remained bare, though the rocks, trees, and shrubbery changed their hues about every twenty seconds. At last, as a blazing colour hit my tired eyeballs, and when the odour had shifted to decayed fish, dried grapefruit, and new-mown hay, I could stand it no longer, and, turning to my neighbour, I tapped him on the shoulder, and politely asked: "Monsieur, will you please tell me the title of this play, piece, drama, morceau, stueck, sonata, odour, picture, symphony, cooking-comedy, or whatever they call it?" The young man to whom I had appealed looked fearfully about him—I had foolishly forgotten that I was invisible in my astral shape—then clutched at his windpipe, beat his silly skull, and screamed aloud: "Mon Dieu! still another kind of aural pleasure," and was carried out in a superbly vertiginous fit. Fright had made him mad. The spectators were too absorbed, or drugged, to pay attention to the incident. Followed a slow, putrid silence. Realising the folly of addressing humans in my astral garb, I sat down in my corner and again watched the stage. Still no trace of actors. The scenery had faded into a dullish dun hue, while the orchestra played a Bach fugue for oboe, lamp-post (transposed to E flat and two policemen) accordions in F and stopped-strumpets. Suddenly the lights went [Pg 225] out, and we were plunged into a blackness that actually pinched the sight, so drear, void, and dead was it. A smell of garlic made us cough, and by a sweep of some current we were saturated with the odours of white violets, the lights were tuned in three keys: yellow of eggs, marron glacé, and orchids, and the soup supply shifted to whisky-sours. "How delicate these contrasts!" hiccoughed my neighbour, and I astrally acquiesced. Then, at last, the stage became peopled by one person, a very tall old man with three eyes, high heels, and a deep voice. Brandishing aloft his whiskers, he curiously muttered: "And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms my beamish boy." Alice in Wonderland, was the mystery-play, and I had arrived too late to witness the slaying of the monster in its many-buttoned waistcoat. How gallantly the "beamish boy" must have dealt the death-stroke to the queer brute as the orchestra sounded the Siegfried and the Dragon motives, and the air all the while redolent with heliotrope. I couldn't help wondering what the particular potage was at this crucial moment. My cogitation was interrupted by the appearance of a gallant-appearing young knight in luminous armour, who dragged after him a huge carcass, half-dragon and two-thirds pig (the other three-thirds must have been suffering from stage fright). The orchestra proclaimed the Abattoir motive, and instantly rose-odours penetrated [Pg 226] the air, the electric shocks ceased, and subtle little kicks were administered to the audience, which, by this time, was well-nigh swooning with these composite pleasures. The scenery had begun to dance gravely to an odd Russian rhythm, and the young hero monotonously intoned a verse, making the vowel sounds sizzle with his teeth, and almost swallowing the consonants: "And as in uffish thought he stood, the Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, came whiffling through the tulgey wood, and burbled as it came." "This beats Gertrude Stein," I thought, as the orchestra played the Galumphing motive from The Ride of the Valkyrs, and the lights were transposed to a shivering purple. Then lilac steam ascended, the orchestra gasped in C-D flat major (for corno di bassetto and three yelping poodles), a smell of cigarettes and coffee permeated the atmosphere, and I knew that this magical banquet of the senses was concluded. I was not sorry, as every nerve was sore from the strain imposed. Talk about faculty of attention! When you are forced to taste, see, hear, touch, and smell simultaneously, then you yearn for a less alembicated art. Synthesis of the arts? Synthesis of rubbish! One at a time, and not too much time at that. I pressed my astral button, and flew homeward, wearily, slowly; I was full of soup and tone, and my ears and nostrils quivered from exhaustion. When I [Pg 227] landed at the Battery it was exactly five o'clock. It had stopped snowing, and an angry sun was preparing to bathe for the night in the wet of the western sky. New Jersey was etched against a cold hard background, and as an old hand-organ struck up It's a Long, Long Way to Retrograd, I threw my cap in the air and joined in (astrally, but joyfully) the group of ragged children who danced around the venerable organist with jeers and shouting. After all, life is greater than the Seven Arts. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> [Pg 228] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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