James Huneker

“ One sunny afternoon in midwinter they went to the old Vienna Café next to Grace Church to drink coffee and chatter about eternity and the town-pump. It was Alfred's beloved stamping-ground. The white suavities of Grace Church, the twist of the street where Broadway debouches into Union Square, aroused in him the fancy that in no other spot of the planet is the tempo of living faster, or any place where the human pulse beats more quickly. The tumults and alarums of the day are more exciting than a Cycle in Cathay. Vitality is at its hottest. ”

“ I wonder what Easter is doing now? That wonderment had become a leading motive with him of late. He bitterly reflected that since the dramatic, the fatal, day in New Hampshire, she had not permitted him the slightest familiarity. She had kissed him on the steamer the day of her departure, but then she had kissed Tom, Dick and Harry with equal readiness, though she hadn't whispered to them: "You dear old Jewel." The memory of her voice, low, mysterious, tender, still fired his blood. I'm afraid I'm a sensual man. Be virtuous and you'll be bilious! ”

“ Whirling in pairs or alone, men and women behaved as if possessed by devils. Ulick had seen camp-meeting revivals, yet they were a mere hymn carnival compared with this orgy of sound and motion. And as a Southern girl the sight could not have been altogether unfamiliar to his companion, who, her face pale, held his arm as if seeking protection. He pressed that arm and he felt the pressure returned. Roarin' Nell lay outstretched on a bench. She was red in the face, her eyes closed. Brother Rainbow banged his gong, his shrewd eyes showing their whites, a sinister grin on his noseless face. ”

“ There are no such monsters. All babies are legitimate and bastards are sometime more beautiful. In the fulness of her heart, from which the mouth speaketh, she uttered all these ideas to her lover, and he smiled, too; was he not above vulgar prejudice! Marry her? Of course, in the twinkling of an eye, when she wished. She was too proud, too happy to mention the odious word. Wait till baby was born; that was the only thing that mattered. What could count in comparison with that magnificent fact—a healthy boy baby! Mona fairly snuggled in Ulick's arms. ”

“ How I loathe Gounod's Ave Maria with its slimy piety, slimy echoes from the brothel. This vibrion of music, Gounod, never touched masterpieces without blighting them. Think of the Bach prelude accompanying the song. Think of mighty Faust maimed, tortured to make an operatic holiday. The Truth, so-called, is not necessarily tonic to all souls. Free-thought is never free; sometimes it is not thought; and it is usually inverted dogmatism. The woman who gives an elderly man the illusion of virility will always be sought after. Man is the only animal who can imagine what is not. ”

“ Easter stood at the pianoforte dreaming. Was it, after all, coming, the realization of her mother's solitary ambition? But once between the sheets Easter didn't dream. The day and its wonderful events had exhausted her. She was awakened in broad daylight by the maid who asked her if she would have coffee or chocolate.
II
Alfred Stone reflected: She is unusual. Never mind her beauty or her voice; it's her personality that will win out. What curious eyes. Hard as steel when she doesn't like the way things are going. Big heart? Yes—for herself. ”

“ The monoliths burn as if to a fire-god their votive offerings. In the moonlight mansions on Fifth Avenue seemed snow-driven. The Synagogue opposite the park, half byzantine, half moresque, might have been mistaken for an Asiatic mosque as it lay sleeping in the moon-rays. The park, as if liquified, flowed in plastic rhythms, a lake of velvety foliage, a mezzotint dividing the east from the west. Sudden furnace bonfires leap up from the Brooklyn side; they are purely commercial; Ulick looked for Whistler's rockets. ”

“ That de Gourmont theory, Ulick, is a horrible idea; sex is hideous if you study it. Let the boys and girls keep their illusions and don't let them believe old Schopenhauer and his instinct of the species dictating their destiny"—"For the sake of sanity, Alfred, shut your trap and let's go home. Wake up, Bell. There's a fresh wife waiting you," said Ulick, glad to get away. "Which wife?" sleepily inquired Bell. "It seems as if a crowd of men can't end the evening without talking sex," grumbled Ulick. "I'm sick of sex." "So are we all," Stone assented, "because sex is a sickly thing. ”

“ The tone was friendly, but for some reason, inexplicable to himself, Ulick felt annoyed. "My ego is all right, Milt. Anyhow, it is freer than yours. Convictions are prisons, you know?" "Ah, Nietzsche. I see you have absorbed his poison, too. My dear boy, those false prophets and corrupters of youth always preach freedom. Freedom for what? While I am not a determinist, yet I admit we can't be free from ourselves. Our personality is an ensemble of our ancestral characteristics. Our instincts are dangerous guides. Just now there is a tendency to place instinct over intellect. ”

“ If, as the Bible says, fornication is a rank sin, why do a few words mumbled over a man and woman by a clergyman or magistrate make it less a sin? It's the same vile act isn't it, even in marriage? Her mother was more shocked at her expression than at the idea which prompted it—an idea as old as the hills. "But Mona, people don't think such things, much less speak them." "They do mother. There isn't a girl in the world who hasn't had this same thought, though she may keep it in the secret cabinet of her mind." ”

“ A chance word of Ulick's had sent Easter up into the air. What! if women were such cowardly cows, the slaves of their husbands, and their dress-makers, the dupes of their lovers and children, was that sufficient reason why a level-headed woman should follow the call of these sheep! A woman should listen to her inward promptings. Easter said she didn't propose to be a shop-girl trying to live on the wage doled her by some self-advertising philanthropists—she gave a list that jarred Alfred's cynicism—those humbugs who drove thousands of girls into the ranks of prostitutes. ”

“ But he was wounded, his eagle wings of rhapsody and rage were broken; they no longer supported him in his flights through the vasty firmament of ideas. Later he was to come to his last asylum in Upper Weimar there to be soothed and watched over by his devoted sister Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche. For Ulick he was a living presence, though the soul was absent from his body at Jena. Zarathustra and Faust, and the exquisite art of Frédéric Chopin were henceforth to be the three guiding stars in his constellation of thinkers and artists. ”

“ But Atlantic City at night. Alfred recalled it as a picture for such different painters as Whistler or Toulouse-Lautrec. A sight not to be duplicated. Miles of electric lamps light up the boardwalk. Even the darker spaces above the Pickle-Pier are festooned with lace-like fire. It is a carnival of flame. You may start from the Inlet with an open book, walk for miles, perusing it all the while, until you reach the lower end of the promenade and touch the last wooden rail. The enormous amount of electricity consumed seems to make the air vital. ”

“ Competition is the life of cocottes, she declared early and often. In her feline fashion she had tried to arouse the jealousy of Paul and Ulick, but vainly. Ulick was touchy when Easter's name was in the mouth of Paul, and he knew that if Paul ever dared to speak of Mona disrespectfully, he would smash him. But jealousy over Dora? Pas pour trois sous!
Dora was a safe port in emotional storms. When all fruit fails welcome haws, runs the adage. Ulick had been on the jagged edge of ennui ever since the visit of Mona. He hadn't the courage to look into his soul, black with a viler sin. ”

“ Yet, Jewel, why harp on marriage?" He endeavoured not to show his surprise. To atavism, and to the Bartlett side of his ancestry, must be set down the reason for this surprise, and a faint, though well-defined, feeling of dissent. Really, a young girl should not say such things to a young man no matter how modern, how advanced she is; no matter if she is fond of him; and the curious part of the thing is that Mona does not boast being advanced or modern, nor, indeed, anything but a real girl.
She noted his confusion and helped him over the stile of perplexity. "Ulick, let's have dream-twins." ”

“ Yes, he went to the new rifle-range and heaven knows what lie he invented for the benefit of his mistress. The affair only proves that any woman who can give to an old man the illusion of virility, he will not only marry her, but he will wear her on his heart of hearts; become her slave, in fact. Sex dies hard in us, and despite popular belief, it is the last of the passions, pushing out avarice and gluttony, which pair of entertaining passions are supposed to illuminate the dusty lonesome years of a man's existence. ”

“ Not to animal life, nor to machinery must we go when studying the human heart, but to vegetables and flowers. I believe that romantic feelings are much less common than we imagine; the vast majority of the race mimic the gestures of the stage and fiction. Food, shelter, fornication, the fight for daily existence—these are the prime levers; not sentiment. We fool ourselves. We take our religion and sentiment in small doses. There are souls of prey like birds of prayer. Few women are in harmony with the moral landscape. What music is comparable to the exquisite sighs of a woman satisfied? ”

“ Once in a while a play comes along by Ibsen, and then you are in contact with the stuff of life. Music is technical, emotional as it may be; but just try to write of it in terms of emotion and your pathos is soon bathos. Pictures are easier to handle because they resemble something in the world. Music does not. It is dug out of our subliminal self, brought to the surface of our consciousness by the composer's art—self-explorer is a truer title than composer, who as a matter of fact decomposes his soul-states, distils his most precious essence into tone. But I fear I bore you—Miss Mona. ”

“ Schopenhauer cooled off his naturally buoyant temperament, but Nietzsche gave him ecstasy as if poured from an overflowing goblet.
He went twice weekly to Weimar there to study pianoforte and theory with a pupil of Franz Liszt. The drowsy old town on the Ilm, once the Athens of Germany, laid his imagination under a spell. He wandered through the deserted gardens on long summer afternoons, Faust in hand, or he would go to Liszt's house in the woods, hardly a quarter hour's stroll from the garden-house of Goethe, and ponder the extraordinary activities of poet and pianist. ”

“ I've told her I wouldn't marry the best woman even though she were the last of her sex on the globe. I've also told her that a man should never live under the same roof with his mistress; in that case what would be the difference between marriage and concubinage; one would be as stupid as the other. Poor Emma Bovary found out from experience that men and women bound by any bond live in the land of platitudes. ”

“ A cold hard-boiled egg is that same heart. Temperament! Well, I don't know. She may be as hot as a red-hot stove, but she is cerebral all the same. Never will waste herself in the swamp of sensual sentimentality. She will learn to use a man just as a man uses a woman. Un, deux, trois—c'est fini! That's the only way. Like trying on a new pair of gloves. Do they fit? No. Chuck 'em away. I think Frida Ash is the right card for her, not Fursch. Easter is not ready yet for the footlights.
He walked into the vestibule of the Maison Felicé and to his surprise found her waiting for him. ”

“ Who is the Siegfried that will release this Brunnhilde from her bed of fire? That's a question which every girl puts to herself in a thousand different forms. I should like to be married. I love children. There is no other adequate method to lure them into this chilly life but the mating of men and women. Really, Mona, does the man matter much? Eugenics, a fine word for an impossible thing! I like Ulick. He wouldn't make me happy, I know. But what's the difference if I can hold his baby and mine to my breast? Nothing else counts. I'm in a nice depressed mood tonight. ”

“ Yes, yes, I have it, Brunnhilde's white horse, or was it one of the white horses of 'Rosmersholm'? No, it wasn't Ibsen at all, it was Wagner. Grane! Aha! That's it. Grane and Shamus. What darlings they must be, and their mother who conceived and bore them never saw them except in her dreams. But they are more real than flesh and blood children. Our dream children. I'm beginning to think I love Ulick.... Oh! he is a dear. I'd better go to bed or I'll end a lunatic. When a woman ceases to be mistress of herself she is likely to become the mistress of a man. ”

“ A second friendship began, that long outlived the death of Huysmans. Maurice Barrès and his deification of the ego, was to be the third and principal étape in his moral development. There was one thing, nevertheless, that M. Huysmans could not persuade him to do; to make peace with his church. Urged to the confessional, there to cleanse his soul, to the communion-table to assuage his thirst for the infinite, Ulick would reply with a shoulder-shrug. The truth was that his sceptical analytical mind and his passion for women kept him from taking the final leap-off into piety and purity. ”

“ She would rather discuss sex-problems than eat. A curious combination. So is her brother. He, too, likes to talk on forbidden subjects. People who have no outlet for their emotions are bound to brood over them and to unbosom themselves without realizing it. Steady, Ulick, steady! I'm not in love or I shouldn't be analyzing my feelings. Is she a trifle smitten? That way lies self-conceit. But she does like to be in my company, and I prefer hers to any woman's—yes, even to Easter's who never gave anyone a chance to breathe, so busy was she with herself. What egotists these mortals be! ”