Books: Maurice Guest

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Towards morning, he had a strange dream, from which he wakened in a
cold sweat. Once more he was wandering through the streets, as he had
done the previous day, apparently in search of something he could not
find. But he did not know himself what he sought. All of a sudden, on
turning a corner, he came upon a crowd of people gathered round some
object in the road, and at once said to himself, this is it, here it
is. He could not, however, see what it actually was, for the people,
who were muttering to themselves in angry tones, strove to keep him
back. At all costs, he felt, he must get nearer to the mysterious
thing, and, in a spirit of bravado, he was pushing through the crowd
to reach it, when a great clamour arose; every one sprang back, and
fled wildly, shrieking: "Moloch, Moloch!" He did not know in the least
what it meant, but the very strangeness of the word added to the
horror, and he, too, fled with the rest; fled blindly, desperately, up
streets and down, watched, it seemed to him, from every window by a
cold, malignant eye, but never daring to turn his head, lest he should
see the awful thing behind him; fled on and on, through streets that
grew ever vaguer and more shadowy, till at last his feet would carry
him no further: he sank down, with a loud cry, sank down, down, down,
and wakened to find that he was sitting up in bed, clammy with fear,
and that dawn was stealing in at the sides of the window.

II.

In Maurice Guest, it might be said that the smouldering unrest of two
generations burst into flame. As a young man, his father, then a poor
teacher in a small provincial town, had been a prey to certain dreams
and wishes, which harmonised ill with the conditions of his life.
When, for example, on a mild night, he watched the moon scudding a
silvery, cloud-flaked sky; when white clouds sailed swiftly, and soft
spring breezes were hastening past; when, in a word, all things seemed
to be making for some place, unknown, afar-off, where he was not, then
he, too, was seized with a desire to be moving, to strap on a knapsack
and be gone, to wander through foreign countries, to see strange
cities and hear strange tongues, was unconsciously filled with the
desire to taste, lighthearted, irresponsible, the joys and experiences
of the WANDERJAHRE, before settling down to face the
matter-of-factnesss of life. And as the present continually pushed the
realisation of his dreams into the future, he satisfied the immediate
thirst of his soul by playing the flute, and by breathing into the
thin, reedy tones he drew from it, all that he dreamed of, but would
never know. For he presently came to a place in his life where two
paths diverged, and he was forced to make a choice between them. It
was characteristic of the man that he chose the way of least
resistance, and having married, more or less improvidently, he turned
his back on the visions that had haunted his youth: afterwards, the
cares, great and small, that came in the train of the years, drove
them ever further into the background. Want of sympathy in his
home-life blunted the finer edges of his nature; of a gentle and
yielding disposition, he took on the commonplace colour of his
surroundings. After years of unhesitating toil, it is true, the most
pressing material needs died down, but the dreams and ambitions had
died, too, never to come again. And as it is in the nature of things
that no one is less lenient towards romantic longings than he who has
suffered disappointment in them, who has failed to transmute them into
reality, so, in this case, the son's first tentative leanings to a
wider life, met with a more deeply-rooted, though less decisive,
opposition, on the part of the father than of the mother.

But Maurice Guest had a more tenacious hold on life.

The home in which he grew up, was one of those cheerless, middle-class
homes, across which never passes a breath of the great gladness, the
ideal beauty of life; where thought never swings itself above the
material interests of the day gone, the day to come, and existence
grows as timid and trivial as the petty griefs and pleasures that
intersperse it. The days drip past, one by one, like water from a
spout after a rain-shower; and the dull monotony of them benumbs all
wholesome temerity at its core. Maurice Guest had known days of this
kind. For before the irksomeness of the school-bench was well behind
him, he had begun his training as a teacher, and as soon as he had
learnt how to instil his own half-digested knowledge into the minds of
others, he received a small post in the school at which his father
taught. The latter had, for some time, secretly cherished a wish to
send the boy to study at the neighbouring university, to make a
scholar of his eldest son; but the longer he waited, the more
unfavourable did circumstances seem, and the idea finally died before
it was born.

Maurice Guest looked back on the four years he had just come through,
with bitterness; and it was only later, when he was engrossed heart
and soul in congenial work, that he began to recognise, and be vaguely
grateful for, the spirit of order with which they had familiarised
him. At first, he could not recall them without an aversion that was
almost physical: this machine-like regularity, which, in its disregard
of mood and feeling, had something of a divine callousness to human
stirrings; the jarring contact with automaton-like people; his
inadequacy and distaste for a task that grew day by day more painful.
His own knowledge was so hesitating, so uncertain, too slight for
self-confidence, just too much and too fresh to allow him to
generalise with the unthinking assurance that was demanded of him. Yet
had anyone, he asked himself, more obstacles to overcome than he, in
his efforts to set himself free? This silent, undemonstrative father,
who surrounded himself with an unscalable wall of indifference; this
hard-faced, careworn mother, about whose mouth the years had traced
deep lines, and for whom, in the course of a single-handed battle with
life, the true reality had come to be success or failure in the
struggle for bread. What was art to them but an empty name, a pastime
for the drones and idlers of existence? How could he set up his
ambitions before them, to be bowled over like so many ninepins? When,
at length, after much heartburning and conscientious scrupling,
he was mastered by a healthier spirit of self-assertion, which made
him rebel against the uselessness of the conflict, and doggedly
resolve to put an end to it, he was only enabled to stand firm by
summoning to his aid all the strengthening egoism, which is latent in
every more or less artistic nature. To the mother, in her honest
narrowness, the son's choice of a calling which she held to be
unfitting, was something of a tragedy. She allowed no item of her duty
to escape her, and moved about the house as usual, sternly observant
of her daily task, but her lips were compressed to a thin line, and
her face reflected the anger that burnt in her heart, too deep for
speech. In the months that followed, Maurice learnt that the censure
hardest to meet is that which is never put into words, which refuses
to argue or discuss: he chafed inwardly against the unspoken
opposition that will not come out to be grappled with, and overthrown.
And, as he was only too keenly aware, there was more to be faced than
a mere determined aversion to the independence with which he had
struck out: there was, in the first place, a pardonably human sense of
aggrievedness that the eldest-born should cross their plans and
wishes; that, after the year-long care and thought they had bestowed
on him, he should demand fresh efforts from them; and, again, most
harassing of all and most invulnerable, such an entire want of faith
in the powers he was yearning to test--the prophet's lot in the mean
blindness of the family--that, at times, it threatened to shake his
hard-won faith in himself.--But before the winter drew to a close he
was away.

Away!--to go out into the world and be a musican--that was his longing
and his dream. And he never came to quite an honest understanding with
himself on this point, for desire and dream were interwoven in his
mind; he could not separate the one from the other. But when he
weighed them, and allowed them to rise up and take shape before him,
it was invariably in this order that they did so. In reality, although
he himself was but vaguely conscious of the fact, it was to some
extent as means to an end, that, when his eyes had been opened to its
presence, he clutched--like a drowning man who seizes upon a
spar--clutched and held fast to his talent. But the necessary insight
into his powers had first to be gained, for it was not one of those
talents which, from the beginning, strut their little world with the
assurance of the peacock. He was, it is true, gifted with an
instinctive feeling for the value and significance of tones--as
a child he sang by ear in a small, sweet voice, which gained him the
only notice he received at school, and he easily picked out his notes,
and taught himself little pieces, on the old-fashioned, silk-faced
piano, which had belonged to his mother as a girl, and at which, in
the early days of her marriage, she had sung in a high, shrill voice,
the sentimental songs of her youth. But here, for want of incentive,
matters remained; Maurice was kept close at his school-books, and,
boylike, he had no ambition to distinguish himself in a field so
different from that in which his comrades won their spurs. It was only
when, with the end of his schooldays in sight, he was putting away
childish things, that he seriously turned his attention to the piano
and his hands. They were those of the pianist, broad, strong and
supple, and the new occupation soon engrossed him deeply; he gave up
all his spare time to it, and, in a few months, attained so creditable
a proficiency, that he went through a course of instruction with a
local teacher of music, who, scenting talent, dismissed preliminaries
with the assurance of his kind, and initiated his pupil into all that
is false and meretricious in the literature of the piano--the cheaply
pathetic, the tinsel of transcription, the titillating melancholy of
Slavonic dance-music--to leave him, but for an increased agility of
finger, not a whit further forward than he had found him. Then
followed months when the phantom of discontent stalked large through
Maurice's life, grew, indeed, day by day more tangible, more easily
defined; for there came the long, restless summer evenings, when it
seemed as if a tranquil darkness would never fall and bar off the
distant, the unattainable; and as he followed some flat, white country
road, that was lost to sight on the horizon as a tapering line, or
looked out across a stretch of low, luxuriant meadows, the very
placidity of which made heart and blood throb quicker, in a sense of
opposition: then the desire to have finished with the life he knew,
grew almost intolerable, and only a spark was needed to set his
resolve ablaze.

It was one evening when the summer had already dragged itself to a
close, that Maurice walked through a drizzling rain to the
neighbouring cathedral town, to attend a performance of ELIJAH. It was
the first important musical experience of his life, and, carried away
by the volumes of sound, he repressed his agitation so ill, that it
became apparent to his neighbour, a small, wizened, old man, who was
leaning forward, his hands hanging between his knees and his eyes
fixed on the floor, alternately shaking and nodding his head.
In the interval between the parts, they exchanged a few words,
halting, excited on Maurice's part, interrogative on his companion's;
when the performance was over, they walked a part of the way together,
and found so much to say, that often, after this, when his week's work
was behind him, Maurice would cover the intervening miles for the
pleasure of a few hours' conversation with this new friend. In a
small, dark room, the air of which was saturated with tobacco-smoke,
he learned, by degrees, the story of the old musician's life: how,
some thirty years previously, he had drifted into the midst of this
provincial population, where he found it easy to earn enough for his
needs, and where his position was below that of a dancing-master; but
how, long ago, in his youth--that youth of which he spoke with a
far-away tone in his voice, and at which he seemed to be looking out
as at a fading shore--it had been his intention to perfect himself as a
pianist. Life had been against him; when, the resolve was strongest,
poverty and ill-heath kept him down, and since then, with the years
that passed, he had come to see that his place would only have been
among the multitude of little talents, whose destiny it is to imitate
and vulgarise the strivings of genius, to swell the over-huge mass of
mediocrity. And so, he had chosen that his life should he a failure--a
failure, that is, in the eyes of the world; for himself, he judged
otherwise. The truth that could be extracted from words was such a
fluctuating, relative truth. Failure! success!--what WAS success, but a
clinging fast, unabashed by smile or neglect, to that better part in
art, in one's self, that cannot be taken away?--never for a thought's
space being untrue to the ideal each one of us bears in his breast;
never yielding jot or tittle to the world's opinion. That was what it
meant, and he who was proudly conscious of having succeeded thus,
could well afford to regard the lives of others as half-finished and
imperfect; he alone was at one with himself, his life alone was a
harmonious whole.

To Maurice Guest, all this mattered little or not at all; it was
merely the unavoidable introduction. The chief thing was that the old
man had known the world which Maurice so desired to know; he had seen
life, had lived much of his youth in foreign lands, and had the
conversation been skilfully set agoing in this direction, he would lay
a wrinkled hand on his listener's shoulder, and tell him of this
shadowy past, with short hoarse chuckles of pleasure and reminiscence,
which invariably ended in a cough. He painted it in vivid colours, and
with the unconscious heightening of effect that comes natural
to one who looks back upon a happy past, from which the countless
pricks and stings that make up reality have faded, leaving in their
place a sense of dreamy, unreal brightness, like that of sunset upon
distant hills. He told him of Germany, and the gay, careless years he
had spent there, working at his art, years of inspiriting,
untrammelled progress; told him of famous musicians he had seen and
known, of great theatre performances at which he had assisted, of
stirring PREMIERES, long since forgotten, of burning youthful
enthusiasms, of nights sleepless with holy excitement, and days of
fruitful, meditative idleness. Under the spell of these reminiscences,
he seemed to come into touch again with life, and his eyes lit with a
spark of the old fire. At moments, he forgot his companion altogether,
and gazed long and silently before him, nodding and smiling to himself
at the memories he had stirred up in his brain, memories of things
that had long ceased to be, of people who had long been quiet and
unassertive beneath their handful of earth, but for whom alone, the
brave, fair world had once seemed to exist. Then he would lose himself
among strange names, in vague histories of those who had borne these
names, and of what they had become in their subsequent journeyings
towards the light, for which they had set out, side by side, with so
much ardour (and oftenest what he had to tell was a modest
mediocrity); but the greater number of them had lost sight one of the
other; the most inseparable friends had, once parted, soon forgotten.
And the bluish smoke sent upwards as he talked, in clouds and spirals
that mounted rapidly and vanished, seemed to Maurice symbolic of the
brief and shadowy lives that were unrolled before him. But, after all
this, when the lights came, the piano was opened, and then, for an
hour or two, the world was forgotten in a different way. It was here
that the chief landmarks of music emerged from the mists in which, for
Maurice, they had hitherto been enveloped; here he learned that Bach
and Beethoven were giants, and made uncertain efforts at appreciation;
learnt that Gluck was a great composer, Mozart a genius of many parts,
Mendelssohn the direct successor in this line of kings. Sonatas,
symphonies, operas, were hammered out with tremendous force and
precision on the harsh, scrupulously tuned piano; and all were
dominated alike by the hoarse voice of the old man, who never wavered,
never faltered, but sang from beginning to end with all his might.
Each one of the pleasant hours spent in this new world helped to
deepen Maurice's resolution to free himself while there was yet
time; each one gave more clearness and precision to his somewhat
formless desires; for, in all that concerned his art, the nameless old
musician hated his native land, with the hatred of the bigot for those
who are hostile or indifferent to his faith.

With a long and hot-chased goal in sight, a goal towards which our
hearts, in joyous eagerness, have already leapt out, it is astonishing
how easy it becomes to make light of the last, monotonous stretch of
road that remains to be travelled. Is there not, just beyond, a
resting-place?--and cool, green shadows? Events and circumstances which
had hitherto loomed forth gigantic, threatening to crush, now appeared
to Maurice trivial and of little moment; he saw them in other
proportions now, for it seemed to him that he was no longer in their
midst: he stood above them and overlooked them, and, with his eyes
fixed upon a starry future, he joyfully prepared himself for his new
life. What is more, those around him helped him to this altered view
of things. For as the present marched steadily upon the future,
devouring as it went; as the departure this future contained took on
the shape of a fact, the countless details of which called for
attention, it began to be accepted as even the most unpalatable facts
in the long run usually are, with an ungracious resignation in face of
the inevitable. Thus, with all his ardour to be gone, Maurice Guest
came to see the last stage of his home-life almost in a bright light,
and even with a touch of melancholy, as something that was fast
slipping from him, never to be there in all its entirety, exactly as
it now was, again: the last calm hour of respite before he plunged
into the triumphs, but also into the tossings and agitations of the
future.

III.

It was April, and a day such as April will sometimes bring: one of
those days when the air is full of a new, mysterious fragrance, when
the sunshine lies like a flood upon the earth, and high clouds hang
motionless in the far-distant blue--a day at the very heels of which it
would seem that summer was lurking. Maurice Guest stood at his window,
both sides of which were flung open, drinking in the warm air, and
gazing absently up at the stretch of sky, against which the dark
roof-lines of the houses opposite stood out abruptly. His hands were
in his pockets, and, to a light beat of the foot, he hummed softly to
himself, but what, he could not have told: whether some fragment of
melody that had lingered in a niche of his brain and now came to his
lips, or whether a mere audible expression of his mood. The strong,
unreal sun of the afternoon was just beginning to reach the house; it
slanted in, golden, by the side of the window, and threw on the wall
above the piano, a single long bar of light.

He leaned over and looked down into the street far below--still no one
there! But it was only half-past four. He stretched himself long and
luxuriously, as if, by doing so, he would get rid of a restlessness
which arose from repressed physical energy, and also from an
impatience to be more keenly conscious of life, to feel it, as it
were, quicken in him, not unakin to that passionate impulse towards
perfection, which, out-of-doors, was urging on the sap and loosening
firm green buds: he had a day's imprisonment behind him, and all
spring's magic was at work to ferment his blood. How small and close
the room was! He leaned out on the sill, as far out as he could, in
the sun. It was shining full down the street now, gilding the
canal-like river at the foot, and throwing over the tall, dingy houses
on the opposite side, a tawdry brightness, which, unlike that of the
morning with its suggestion of dewy shade, only served to bring out
the shabbiness of broken plaster and paintless window; a shamefaced
yet aggressive shabbiness, where high-arched doorways and wide entries
spoke to better days, and also to a subsequent decay, now openly
admitted in the little placards which dotted them here and there,
bearing the bold-typed words GARCON LOGIS, and dangling bravely
yellow from the windows of the cheap lodgings they proclaimed vacant.
It was very still; the hoarse voice of a fruit-seller crying his wares
in the adjoining streets, was to be heard at intervals, but each time
less distinctly, and from the distance came the faint tones of a
single piano. How different it was in the morning! Then, if, pausing a
moment from his work, he opened the window and leaned out for a brief
refreshment, what a delightful confusion of sounds met his ear! Pianos
rolled noisily up and down, ploughing one through the other, beating
one against the other, key to key, rhythm to rhythm, each in a
clamorous despair at being unable to raise its voice above the rest,
at having to form part of this jumble of discord: some so near at hand
or so directly opposite that, none the less, it was occasionally
possible to follow them through the persistent reiterations of a
fugue, or through some brilliant glancing ETUDE, the notes of which
flew off like sparks; others, further away, of which were audible only
the convulsive treble outbursts and the toneless rumblings of the
bass, now and then cut shrilly through by the piercing sharpness of a
violin, now and then, at quieter moments, borne up and accompanied by
the deep, guttural tones of a neighbouring violoncello. This was
always discovered at work upon scales, uncertain, hesitating scales on
the lower strings, and, heard suddenly, after the other instruments'
genial hubbub, it sounded like some inarticulate animal making uncouth
attempts at expression. At rare intervals there came a lull, and then,
before all burst forth again together, or fell in, one by one, a
single piano or the violin would, like a solo voice in a symphony,
bear the whole burden; or if the wind were in the west, it would
sometimes carry over with it, from the woods on the left, the mournful
notes of a French horn, which some unskilful player had gone out to
practise.

This was that new world of which he was now a part--into which he had
been so auspiciously received.

Yes, the beginning and the thousand petty disquiets that go with
beginnings, were behind him; he had made a start, and he believed a
good one--thanks to Dove. He was really grateful to Dove. A chance
acquaintance, formed on one of those early days when he loitered,
timid and unsure, about the BUREAU of the Conservatorium, Dove had
taken him up with what struck even the grateful new-comer as
extraordinary good-nature, going deliberately out of his way to be of
service to him, meeting him at every turn with assistance and advice.
It was Dove who had helped him over the embarrassments of the
examination; it was through Dove's influence that he had obtained a
private interview with Schwarz, and, in Dove's opinion, Schwarz was
the only master in Leipzig under whom it was worth while to study; the
only one who could be relied on to give the exhaustive TECHNIQUE that
was indispensable, without, in the process, destroying what was of
infinitely more account, the individuality, the TEMPERAMENT of the
student. This and more, Dove set forth at some length in their
conversations; then, warming to his work, he would go further: would
go on to speak of phrasings and interpretations; of an artistic use of
the pedals, and the legitimate participation of the emotions; of the
confines of absolute music as touched in the Ninth Symphony: would
refer incidentally to Schopenhauer and make Wagner his authority,
using terms that were new to his hearer, and, now and then, by way of
emphasis, bringing his palm down flat and noiselessly upon the
table.--It had not taken them long to become friends;
fellow-countrymen, of the same age, with similar aims and interests,
they had soon slipped into one of the easy-going friendships of youth.

A quarter to five! As the strokes from the neighbouring church--clock
died away, the melody of Siegfried's horn was whistled up from the
street, and looking over, Maurice saw his friend. He seized his music
and went hastily down the four flights of stairs.