Part 15

HOUSTON STEWART CHAMBERLAIN.

Between many of my readers and the joyful heart there seems to stand but a single obstacle--their lack of creativeness. They feel that they could live and die happy if only they might become responsible for the creation of something which would remain to bless mankind after they are gone. But as it is, how can they have the joyful heart when they are continually being tortured by regret because God did not make masters of them?

One is sad because he is not a master of poetry. He never sees A, his golden-tongued friend, without a pang very like the envy of a childless man for a happy father. But he has no suspicion that he is partly responsible for A's poetic excellence. Another thinks her life a mistake because the Master of all good workmen did not make her a sculptor. Yet all the while she is lavishing unawares upon her brother or son or husband the very stuff that art is made of. Others are inconsolable because no fairy wand at their birth destined them for men of original action, for discoverers in science, pianists, statesmen, or actors; for painters, philosophers, inventors, or architects of temples or of religions.

Now my task in this last chapter is a more delightful one than if I were the usual solicitor of fiction, come to inform the poor-but-honest newsboy that he is a royal duke. It is my privilege to comfort many of the comfortless by revealing to them how and why they are--or may be--masters of an art as indispensable as the arts which they now regard so wistfully. I mean the art of master-making--the art of being a master by proxy.

To be specific, let us single out one of the arts and see what it means to master it by proxy. Suppose we consider the simple case of executive music. In a book called "The Musical Amateur" I have tried to prove (more fully than is here possible) that the reproduction of music is a social act. It needs two: one to perform, one to appreciate. Both are almost equally essential to a good performance. The man who appreciates a musical phrase unconsciously imitates it with almost imperceptible contractions of throat or lips. These contractions represent an incipient singing or whistling. Motions similar to these, and probably more fully developed, are made at the same time by his mind and his spirit. The whole man actually feels his way, physically and psychically, into the heart of the music. He is turned into a sentient sounding-board which adds its own contribution of emotion to the music and sends it back by wireless telegraphy to the performer. When a violinist and a listener of the right sort meet for musical purposes, this is what happens. The violinist happens to be in the mood for playing. This means that he has feelings which demand expression. These his bow releases. The music strikes the listener, sets him in vibration as if he were a sounding-board, and rouses in him feelings similar to those of the violinist. Enriched by this new contribution, the emotional complex resounds back to the violinist, intensifying his original "feeling-state." In its heightened form it then recoils back to the appreciator, "and so on, back and forth, growing in stimulating power at each recoil. The whole process is something like a hot 'rally' in tennis, with the opponents closing in on each other and the ball shuttling across the net faster with every stroke as the point gains in excitement and pleasure. 'Social resonance' might be a good way of describing the thing." This, briefly told, is what passes between the player of music and his creative listener.

In application this principle does not by any means stop with performing or composing music or with the fine arts. It goes on to embrace more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the fiddler's or in any other artist's philosophy. Perhaps it is not too much to say that no great passion or action has ever had itself adequately expressed without the cooeperation of this social resonance, without the help of at least one of those modest, unrecognized partners of genius, the social resonators, the masters by proxy.

Thanks, dear master-makers unawares! The gratitude of the few who understand you is no less sincere because you do not yet realize your own thankworthiness. Our children shall rise up and call you blessed. For in your quiet way, you have helped to create the world's creators--the preachers, prophets, captains, artists, discoverers, and seers of the ages. To these, you, unrecognized and unawares, have been providing the very sinews of peace, vision, war, beauty, originality, and insight.

What made the game of art so brilliant in the age of Pericles? It was not star playing by individuals. It was steady, consistent team-work by the many. Almost every one of the Athenians who were not masters were masters by proxy. In "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century" Chamberlain holds that Greek culture derived its incomparable charm from "a peculiar harmony of greatness"; and that "if our poets are not in every respect equal to the greatest poets of Athens, that is not the fault of their talent, but of those who surround them." Only imagine the joyful ease of being a poet in the Periclean atmosphere! It must have been as exhilarating as coasting down into the Yosemite Valley with John Muir on an avalanche of snow.

But even in that enlightened age the master received all the credit for every achievement, and his creative appreciator none at all. And so it has been ever since that particular amoeba which was destined for manhood had a purse made up for him and was helped upon the train of evolution by his less fortunate and more self-effacing friends who were destined to remain amoebae; because the master by proxy is such a retiring, unspectacular sort of person that he has never caught the popular imagination or found any one to sing his praises. But if he should ever resent this neglect and go on strike, we should realize that without him progress is impossible. For the real lords of creation are not always the apparent lords. We should bear in mind that the most important part of many a throne is not the red velvet seat, the back of cloth of gold, or the onyx arms that so sumptuously accommodate the awe and majesty of acknowledged kings. Neither is it the seed-pearl canopy that intercepts a too searching light from majesty's complexion. It is a certain little filigreed hole in the throne-back which falls conveniently close to the sovereign's ear when he leans back between the periods of the wise, beauteous, and thrilling address to his subjects.

For doubled up in a dark, close box behind the chair of state is a humble, drab individual who, from time to time, applies his mouth to the wrong side of the filigreed hole and whispers things. If he were visible at all, he would look like the absurd prompter under the hood at the opera. He is not a famous person. Most people are so ignorant of his very existence that he might be pardoned for being an agnostic about it himself. The few others know little and care less. Only two or three of the royal family are aware of his name and real function. They refer to him as M. Power-Behind-the-Throne, Master-by-Proxy of State.

There is one sign by which masters by proxy may be detected wherever met. They are people whose presence is instantly invigorating. Before you can make out the color of their eyes you begin to feel that you are greater than you know. It is as if they wore diffused about them auras so extensive and powerful that entering these auras was equivalent to giving your soul electric massage. You do not have to touch the hem of their garments nor even see them. The auras penetrate a brick wall as a razor penetrates Swiss cheese. And if you are fortunate enough to be on the other side of the partition, you become aware with a thrill that "virtue," in the beautiful, Biblical sense of the word, has gone out of somebody and into you.

If ever I return to live in a city apartment (which may the gods forfend!) I shall this time select the apartment with almost sole reference to what comes through the walls. I shall enter one of those typical New York piles which O. Henry described as "paved with Parian marble in the entrance-hall, and cobblestones above the first floor," and my inquiry will be focused on things far other than Parian marble and cobblestones. I shall walk about the rooms and up and down the bowling-alleys of halls trying to make myself as sensitive to impressions as are the arms of the divining-rod man during his solemn parade with the wand of witch-hazel. And when I feel "virtue" from the next apartment streaming through the partition, there will I instantly give battle to the agent and take up my abode. And this though it be up six flights of cobblestones, without elevator, without closet-room, with a paranoiac for janitor, and radiators whose musical performance all the day long would make a Cleveland boiler factory pale with envy. For none of these things would begin to offset the privilege of living beside a red-letter wall whose influence should be as benignly constructive as Richard Washburn Child's "Blue Wall" was malignly destructive.

To-day I should undoubtedly be much more of a person if I had once had the pleasure of living a wall away from Richard Watson Gilder. He was a true master by proxy. For he was a vastly more creative person than his published writings will ever accredit him with being. Not only with his pen, but also with his whole self he went about doing good. "Virtue" fairly streamed from him all the time. Those bowed shoulders and deep-set, kindly eyes would emerge from the inner sanctum of the "Century" office. In three short sentences he would reject the story which had cost you two years of labor and travail. But all the time the fatal words were getting themselves uttered, so much "virtue" was passing from him into you that you would turn from his presence exhilarated, uplifted, and while treading higher levels for the next week, would produce a check-bearing tale. The check, however, would not bring you a tithe of the "virtue" that the great editor's personal rebuff had brought.

But more than to any editor, writers look to their readers for support, especially to their unknown correspondents--postal and psychic. Leonard Merrick has so finely expressed the attitude of many writers that I cannot forbear giving his words to his "public":

I have thought of you so often and wanted to win a smile from you; you don't realize how I have longed to meet you--to listen to you, to have you lift the veil that hides your mind from me. Sometimes in a crowd I have fancied I caught a glimpse of you; I can't explain--the poise of the head, a look in the eyes, there was something that hinted it was You. And in a whirlwind of an instant it almost seemed that you would recognize me; but you said no word--you passed, a secret from me still. To yourself where you are sitting you are just a charming woman with "a local habitation and a name"; but to me you are not Miss or Madam, not M. or N.--you are a Power, and I have sought you by a name you have not heard--you are my Public. And O my Lady, I am speaking to you! I feel your presence in my senses, though you are far away and I can't hear your answer.... It is as if I had touched your hand across the page.

There are probably more masters by proxy to be found among the world's mothers than in any other class. The profession of motherhood is such a creative one, and demands so constant an outgo of unselfish sympathy, that a mother's technic as silent partner is usually kept in a highly efficient state. And occasionally a mother of a genius deserves as much credit for him spiritually as physically. Think of Frau Goethe, for example.

Many a genius attains a commanding position largely through the happy chance of meeting many powerful masters by proxy and through his happy facility for taking and using whatever creativeness these have to offer. Genius has been short-sightedly defined as "an infinite capacity for taking pains." Galton more truthfully holds that the triune factors of genius are industry, enthusiasm, and ability. Now if we were to insist, as so many do, on making a definition out of a single one of these factors to the neglect of the others, we should come perhaps nearer the mark by saying that genius is an infinite capacity for taking others' pains. But all such definings are absurd. For the genius absorbs and alchemizes not only the industry of his silent partners, but also their ability and enthusiasm. Their enthusiasm is fortunately contained in a receptacle as generous as Philemon's famous pitcher. And the harder the genius tries to pour it empty, the more the sparkling liquid bubbles up inside. The transaction is like "the quality of mercy"--

"It blesseth him that gives and him that takes."

The ability to receive as well as give this sort of help varies widely with the individual. Some geniuses of large psychic power are able instantly to seize out of any crowd whatever creativeness there is in it. These persons are spiritual giants. Their strength is as the strength of ten because their grasp is sure. They are such stuff as Shakespeares are made of.

Others are not psychically gifted. They can absorb creativeness only from their nearest and dearest, in the most favoring environment, and only after the current has been seriously depleted by wastage in transmission. But these are the two extremes. They are as rare as extremes usually are.

In general I believe that genius, though normally capable of drawing creativeness from a number of different sources, has as a rule depended largely on the collaboration of one chief master by proxy. This idea gazes wide-eyed down a fascinating vista of speculation. Who, for instance, was Lincoln's silent partner? the power behind the throne of Charlemagne? Buddha's better self? Who were the secret commanders of Grant, Wellington, and Caesar? Who was Moliere's hidden prompter? the conductor of the orchestra called Beethoven? the psychic comrade of Columbus?

I do not know. For history has never commemorated, as such, the masters by proxy with honor due, or indeed with any honor or remembrance at all. It will take centuries to explore the past with the sympathetic eye and the understanding heart in order to discover what great tombs we have most flagrantly neglected.

Already we can single out a few of them. The time is coming when music-lovers will never make a pilgrimage to the resting-place of Wagner without making another to the grave of Mathilde Wesendonk, whose "virtue" breathed into "Tristan and Isolde" the breath of life. We shall not much longer neglect the tomb of Charles Darwin's father, who, by making the evolutionist financially independent, gave his services to the world. Nor shall we disregard the memory of that other Charles-Darwin-by-proxy--his wife. For her tireless comradeship and devotion and freely lavished vitality were an indispensable reservoir of strength to the great invalid. Without it the world would never have had the "Origin of Species" or the "Descent of Man."

Other instances throng to mind. I have small doubt that Charles Eliot Norton was the silent partner of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Lowell; Ste. Clare of Francis of Assisi; Joachim and Billroth of Brahms, and Dorothy Wordsworth of William. By a pleasant coincidence, I had no sooner noted down the last of these names than I came upon this sentence in Sarah Orne Jewett's Letters: "How much that we call Wordsworth himself was Dorothy to begin with." And soon after, I found these words in a letter which Brahms sent Joachim with the score of his second "Serenade": "Care for the piece a little, dear friend; it is very much yours and sounds of you. Whence comes it, anyway, that music sounds so friendly, if it is not the doing of the one or two people whom one loves as I love you?" The impressionable Charles Lamb must have had many such partners besides his sister Mary. Hazlitt wrote: "He is one of those of whom it may be said, 'Tell me your company, and I'll tell you your manners.' He is the creature of sympathy, and makes good whatever opinion you seem to entertain of him."

Perhaps the most creative master by proxy I have ever known was the wife of one of our ex-Presidents. To call upon her was to experience the elevation and mental unlimbering of three or four glasses of champagne, with none of that liquid's less desirable after-effects. I should not wonder if her eminent husband's success were not due as much to her creativeness as to his own.

It sometimes happens that the most potent masters in their own right are also the most potent masters by proxy. They grind out more power than they can consume in their own particular mill-of-the-gods. I am inclined to think that Sir Humphry Davy was one of these. He was the discoverer of chlorine and laughing-gas, and the inventor of the miner's safety lamp. He was also the deus ex machina who rescued Faraday from the bookbinder's bench, made him the companion of his travels, and incidentally poured out the overplus of his own creative energy upon the youth who has recently been called "perhaps the most remarkable discoverer of the nineteenth century." Schiller was another of these. "In more senses than one your sympathy is fruitful," wrote Goethe to him during the composition of "Faust."

Indeed, the greatest Master known to history was first and foremost a master by proxy. It was He who declared that we all are "members one of another." Writing nothing Himself, He inspired others to write thousands of immortal books. He was unskilled as painter, or sculptor, or architect; yet the greatest canvases, marbles, and cathedrals since He trod the earth have sprung directly from his influence. He was no musician.

"His song was only living aloud."