Bedouins E-Book

James Huneker

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Mary Garden, Debussy, Chopin or the circus, Botticelli, Poe, Brahmsody, Anatole France, Mirbeau, Caruso on wheels, Calico cats, The artistic temperament; Idols and ambergris, with The supreme sin, Grindstones, A masque of music, and The vision malefic; with various portraits of Mary Garden in operatic costume.
That little girl down Boston way, who had mastered William James and Boris Sidis before she was in her teens, behaved badly one afternoon. Possibly it was the sultry weather, or growing pains—in the psychic sphere, of course—or, perhaps, it may have been due to the reflexes from prolonged attention to the Freudian psycho-analysis and the significance of Twilight Sleep; but whatever the cause, that precocious child flew off her serene handle and literally “sassed” the entire household. The tantrum over—she afterward described it as a uric-acid storm—and order reigning once more in Bach Bay, she was severely interrogated by her male parent as to the whys and wherefores of her singular deviation from accustomed glacial intellectual objectivity. Her answer was in the proper key: “My multiple personalities failed to co-ordinate. Hence the distressing lack of centripetal functioning.” She was immediately forgiven. Multiple personalities are to blame for much in this vale of tears; that is, if you are unlucky or lucky enough to be possessed of the seven devils of psychology.
 

Leseprobe

BEDOUINS

From a photograph by De Meyer

MARY GARDEN—HERSELF

BEDOUINS

MARY GARDEN, DEBUSSY, CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS, BOTTICELLI, POE, BRAHMSODY, ANATOLE FRANCE, MIRBEAU, CARUSO ON WHEELS, CALICO CATS, THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT; IDOLS AND AMBERGRIS; WITH THE SUPREME SIN, GRINDSTONES, A MASQUE OF MUSIC, AND THE VISION MALEFIC

BY JAMES HUNEKER

WITH VARIOUS PORTRAITS OF MARY GARDEN IN OPERATIC COSTUME

1920

© 2023 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782383839774

THIS BOOK OF BEDOUINS IS DEDICATED “À la très-belle, à la très-bonne, à la très-chère.”

“J’aime mieux le désert, je retourne chez les Bédouins qui sont libres....”

Gustave Flaubert.

“The Bedouins camp within Pharaoh’s palace walls, and the old war-ship is given over to the rats.”

Robert Louis Stevenson.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

PAGE

PART I—MARY GARDEN

I.

Superwoman

3

II.

Intimate

15

III.

The Baby, the Critic, and the Guitar

21

IV.

Interpreter

30

V.

Mélisande and Debussy

45

VI.

The Artistic Temperament

53

VII.

The Passing of Octave Mirbeau

64

VIII.

Anarchs and Ecstasy

73

IX.

Painted Music

81

X.

Poe and His Polish Contemporary

94

XI.

George Luks

106

XII.

Concerning Calico Cats

118

XIII.

Chopin or the Circus?

125

XIV.

Caruso on Wheels

134

XV.

Sing and Grow Voiceless

144

XVI.

Anatole France: The Last Phase

154

XVII.

A Masque of Music

164

PART II—IDOLS AND AMBERGRIS

I.

The Supreme Sin

177

II.

Brothers-in-Law

201

III.

Grindstones

216

IV.

Venus or Valkyr?

225

V.

The Cardinal’s Fiddle

247

VI.

Renunciation

256

VII.

The Vision Malefic

261

ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

Mary Garden—Herself

Frontispiece

Rosina Galli

24

Mary Garden as Mélisande

34

Mary Garden as Monna Vanna

38

Mary Garden as Salome

78

Rosina Galli as the Princess in “Le Coq d’Or”

140

PART IMARY GARDEN

ISUPERWOMAN

LA BEAUTÉ

“Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre, Et mon sein, où chacun s’est meurtri tour à tour, Est fait pour inspirer au poëte un amour Éternel et meut, ainsi, que la matière.”

—Charles Baudelaire.

That little girl down Boston way, who had mastered William James and Boris Sidis before she was in her teens, behaved badly one afternoon. Possibly it was the sultry weather, or growing pains—in the psychic sphere, of course—or, perhaps, it may have been due to the reflexes from prolonged attention to the Freudian psycho-analysis and the significance of Twilight Sleep; but whatever the cause, that precocious child flew off her serene handle and literally “sassed” the entire household. The tantrum over—she afterward described it as a uric-acid storm—and order reigning once more in Bach Bay, she was severely interrogated by her male parent as to the whys and wherefores of her singular deviation from accustomed glacial intellectual objectivity. Her answer was in the proper key: “My multiple personalities failed to co-ordinate. Hence the distressing lack of centripetal functioning.” She was immediately forgiven. Multiple personalities are to blame for much in this vale of tears; that is, if you are unlucky or lucky enough to be possessed of the seven devils of psychology.

Mary Garden was, no doubt, a naughty little girl in her time. That she climbed trees, fought boys twice her size, stuck out her tongue at pious folk, scandalized her parents, and tore from the heads of nice girls handfuls of hair, I am sure. Hedda Gabler thus treated gentle Thea Elvstad in the play. But was this demon Mary aware of her multiple personalities? Of her complexes? Her art fusion is such perfect synthesis. Subconscious is nowadays an excuse for the Original Sin with which we are saddled by theologians.

Well, one bad turn deserves another, and we may easily picture the wild Scottish thistle defiantly shrugging shoulders at law and order. She did not analyze her Will-to-Raise-Merry-Hell. No genius of her order ever does. There had been signs and omens. Her mother before her birth had dreamed wonderful dreams; dreamed and prayed that she might become a singer. But even maternal intuition could not have foreseen such a swan triumphantly swimming through the troubled waters of life. A swan, did I say? A condor, an eagle, a peacock, a nightingale, a panther, a society dame, a gallery of moving-pictures, a siren, an indomitable fighter, a human woman with a heart as big as a house, a lover of sport, an electric personality, and a canny Scotch lassie who can force from an operatic manager wails of anguish because of her close bargaining over a contract; in a word, a Superwoman.

My dear friend and master, the late Remy de Gourmont, wrote that man differs from his fellow animals—he didn’t say “lower”—because of the diversity of his aptitudes. Man is not the only organism that shows multiple personalities; even in plant life pigmentation and the power of developing new species prove that our vaunted superiorities are only relative. I may refer you to the experiments of Hugo de Vriès at the Botanical Gardens, Amsterdam, where the grand old Dutch scientist presented me with sixteen-leaf clover naturally developed, and grown between sunset and dawn; also an evening primrose—Æonthera Lamarckiana—which shoots into new flowers. Multiple personalities again. In the case of Mary Garden we call her artistic aptitudes “the gift of versatility.” All distinguished actresses have this serpent-like facility of shedding their skin and taking on a fresh one at will. She is Cleopatra—with “serpent and scarab for sign”—or Mélisande, Phryne, or Monna Vanna; as Thaïs she is both saint and courtesan, her Salome breeds horror; and in the simplicities of Jean the Juggler of Notre Dame a Mary Garden, hitherto submerged, appears: tender, boyish, sweet, fantastic; a ray of moonshine has entered his head and made of him an irresponsible yet irresistibly charming youth.

Not without warrant is Karma believed in by people whose imagination cannot be penned behind the bars of Now. Before to-day was yesterday, and to traverse that Eternal Corridor of Time has been the fate of mankind. The Eternal Return—rather say, the Eternal Recommencement—mad as it seems, is not to be made mock of. It is always the same pair of eyes that peer through windows opening on infinity. What the Karmas of Mary Garden? In spirit-land what avatars! Is she the reincarnation of that Phryne of the “splendid scarlet sins,” or the Faustine who crowded into a moment the madness of joy and crime; or the recrudescence of a Sapho who turned her back on the Leucadian promontory, turned from the too masculine Phaon and sought her Anactoria, sought and wooed her with lyric sighs; has she recaptured, this extraordinary Mary of Aberdeen, the soul of Aspasia, who beguiled Pericles and artistic Athens with the sinuous irony of the serpent; and Gismonda, Louise, and Violetta, all those subtle sonorous sinners—was she in her anterior existence any or all of them? Did she know the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome? Henry James has warned us not to ask of an author why he selects a particular subject for treatment. It is a dangerous question to put; the answer might prove disconcerting. And with Miss Garden the same argument holds. Her preference for certain characters is probably dictated by reasons obscure even to herself. With her the play-instinct is imperious; it dominates her daylight hours, it overflows into her dream-life. Again the sounding motive of multiple personalities, Karma, subconsciousness, the profound core of human nature. And on the palette of her art there is the entire gamut of tones, from passionate purple to the iridescent delicacies of iris-grey.

That Mary Garden interprets a number of widely differentiated characters is a critical platitude. Chapter and verse might be given for her excellences as well as her defects. Nor does she depend upon any technical formula or formulas. Versatility is her brevet of distinction. An astounding versatility. Now, the ways and means of the acting-singer are different from actors in the theatre. Dramatic values are altered. The optique of the opera shifts the stock attitudes, gestures, poses, and movements into another and more magnified dimension. Victor Maurel, master of all singing-actors, employed a sliding scale of values in his delineation of De Nevers, Don Giovanni, Iago, and Falstaff. His power of characterization enabled him to portray a Valentine true to type, nevertheless individual; and if there is a more banal figure on the operatic boards than Valentine, we do not know his name (perhaps Faust...!). But every year the space that separates the lyric from the dramatic stage is shrinking. Richard Wagner was not the first composer to stress action; he is the latest, however, whose influence has been tremendously far-reaching. He insisted that the action should suit the singing word. To-day acting and singing are inextricably blended, and I can conceive of nothing more old-fashioned and outmoded than the Wagnerian music-drama as interpreted in the dramatic terms of the old Wagnerian singers. They walked, rather waddled, through the mystic mazes of the score, shouted or screamed the music, and generally were prodigious bores—except when Lilli Lehmann sang. After all, Wagner must be sung. When Jean de Reszke pictured a Tristan—a trifle of the carpet-knight—he both sang and acted. It was the beginning of the New Wagner, a totally changed Wagner, else his music-drama will remain in dusty pigeonholes. Debussy has sounded the modern key.

There is born, or reborn—nothing is new since the early Florentines—a New Opera, and in its train new methods of interpretation. Merely to sing well is as futile as attempting to act though voiceless. The modern trend is away from melodrama, whether Italian, French, or German; away from its antique, creaking machinery. Debussy patterned after Wagner for a time and then blazed new paths. As Serge Prokofieff so acutely observed to me: “In Pelléas and Mélisande Debussy rewrote Tristan and Isolde.” The emotional scale is transposed to fewer dynamic values and rhythms made more subtle; the action is shown as in a dream. The play’s the thing, and reality is muffled. Elsewhere we have studied the Mélisande of Mary Garden. Like her Monna Vanna, it reveals the virtues and shortcomings of the New Opera. Too static for popular taste, it is nevertheless an escape from the tyranny of operatic convention. Like the rich we shall always have “grand opera” with us. It is the pabulum of the unmusical, the unthinking, the tasteless. Its theatricalisms are more depressing than Sardou’s. The quintessence of art, or the arts, which the modern Frenchmen, above all, the new Russian composers (from the mighty Slavic races may come the artistic, perhaps the religious salvation of the world—for I am a believer in Dostoievsky’s, not Tolstoy’s, Christianity), are distilling into their work is for more auditors than the “ten superior persons scattered throughout the universe” of whom Huysmans wrote. There is a growing public that craves, demands, something different from the huge paraphernalia of crudely colored music, scenery, costume, lath and plaster, and vociferous singing. Oh, the dulness, the staleness, the brutal obviousness of it all! Every cadence with its semaphoric signalling, every phrase and its accompanying gesture. Poetry is slain at a stroke, the ear promise-crammed, but imagination goes hungry. The New Art—an art of precious essences, an evocation, an enchantment of the senses, a sixth sense—is our planetary ideal.

And in the New Opera Mary Garden is the supreme exemplar. She sounds the complex modern note. She does not represent, she evokes. She sings and she acts, and the densely woven web is impossible to disentangle. Her Gaelic temperament is of an intensity; she is white-hot, a human dynamo with sudden little retorsions that betray a tender, sensitive soul, through the brilliant, hard shell of an emerald personality; she is also the opal, with it chameleonic hues. Her rhythms are individual. Her artistic evolution may be traced. She stems from the Gallic theatre. She has studied Sarah Bernhardt and Yvette Guilbert—the perfect flowering of the “diseuse”—but she pins her faith to the effortless art of Eleonora Duse. The old contention that stirred Coquelin and Henry Irving does not interest her so much as does Duse. We have discussed the Coquelin-Irving crux: should an actor leave nothing to chance or should he improvise on the spur of high emotions?—that is what the question comes to. Miss Garden denied her adherence either to Coquelin or Irving. I asked her to give us a peep into her artistic cuisine while she prepared her sauces. Notwithstanding her refusal to let us participate in the brewing of her magic broth, I still believe that she sided with Coquelin. She is eminently cerebral. And yet her chief appeal is to the imagination. Not a stroke of her camel’s-hair brush, not the boldest massing of colors, are left to chance. She knows the flaming way she came, she knows the misty return. Not a tone of her naturally rich, dark voice but takes on the tinting of the situation. This doesn’t forbid a certain latitude for temperamental variations, which are plentiful at each of her performances. She knows tempo rubato and its value in moods. She has mastered, too, the difficult quality described by William Gillette as the First-time Illusion in Acting. Various are the Mary Gardens in her map of art.

And she is ours. Despite her Scottish birth she has remained invincibly Yankee. Despite long residence in her beloved Paris, enough American has rubbed off on her, and the resilient, dynamic, overflowing, and proud spirit that informs her art and character are American or nothing. Race counts. Can any good come out of our Nazareth of art? The answer is inevitable: Yes, Mary Garden. She is Our Mary. Lyrically, dramatically ours, yet an orchid. Dear old Flaubert forcibly objected to Sarah Bernhardt being called “a social expression.” But she was, and this despite her Dutch ancestry and the exotic strain in her blood. Miss Garden may not emphasize her American side, but it is the very skeleton of her artistic organism. Would that an Aubrey Beardsley lived to note in evanescent traceries her potent personality, a rare something that arouses the “emotion of recognition,” but which we cannot define. “Come,” said Berlioz to Legouvé in the early years of the third decade of the last century. “I am going to let you see something which you have never seen, and some one whom you shall never forget.” Berlioz meant the playing and personality of Frédéric Chopin. Garden is leagues asunder from Chopin—who was the rarest apparition of his age; but as an interpretative artist she is rare enough for sympathetic writers to embalm in the amber of their pagan prose; definitely to pin to their pages this gorgeous dragon-fly.

Another bribe to her audience is the beauty of Mary Garden. But I do not wish here to dwell upon its value in her unforgettable portrayals of the dear dead grand ladies, the stately courtesans of the dim past. Stéphane Mallarmé wrote a poem, though not in verse, depicting a crowd assembled in the canvas house of the Interpreter of Past Things.

George Moore thus Englished “The Future Phenomenon.” A showman tells the despairing, ugly men and women of his wonderful prize. “No sign regales you of the spectacle within, for there is not now a painter capable of presenting any sad shadow of it. I bring alive (and preserved through the years by sovereign science) a woman of old time. Some folly, original and simple, in ecstasy of gold, I know not what she names it, her hair falls with the grace of rich stuffs about her face and contrasts with the blood-like nudity of her lips. In place of her vain gown she has a body; and her eyes, though like rare stones, are not worth the look that leaps from the happy flesh; the breasts, raised as if filled with an eternal milk, are pointed to the sky, and the smooth limbs still keep the salt of the primal sea....” You think of fair-haired Mélisande as she exquisitely murmurs her pathetic “Je ne suis pas heureuse ici.”

Some years ago in Paris I saw and heard the Garden Traviata. The singing was superlative; she then boasted a coloratura style that would surprise those who now only know her vocalization. It was, however, the conception and acting that intrigued me. Originality stamped both. The death scene was of unusual poignancy; evidently the young American had been spying upon Bernhardt and Duse. This episode adumbrated the marvellous death of Mélisande, the most touching that I can recall in either the lyric or dramatic theatre. It is a pity that she cannot find sterner stuff than Massenet, Leroux, Fevrier, and the rest of that puff-paste decorative school. There are composers, too, of more vital calibre than Camille Erlanger. Debussy is a master; but there must be newer men who could view Mary Garden as the ideal exponent of their music. Meanwhile, she has discovered a rôle in which she would pique the curiosity of the most uncritical mossbacks. She has added Isolde to her long list. Mary Garden and Isolde! Incredible! Nevertheless, an interesting experiment this if she could be persuaded to voice the sorrows of the Irish Princess. It would be no longer Wagner. It would suffer a rich sea-change. Wagner muted, perhaps Wagner undone; certainly unsung if we remember glorious Olive Fremstad. But a magical Isolde, with more than a hint of the perversely exotic we feel in Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings of Isolde and Tristan. The modern note again. Beardsley paraphrasing Botticelli; Watteau plucking at the robe of Rubens; Debussy smiting the chords of Wagner. Such an Isolde would be too bewildering to be true.

IIINTIMATE

“Et on fait la guerre avec de la musique, des panaches, des drapeaus, des hanches d’or....”

—Tentation de Saint Antoine (slightly altered).

The penalty of publicity is one which singers seldom evade. Little need to give the reason, nevertheless, for sensitive souls it is a trial to see one’s personality put in the wash, squeezed, and hung up to dry with other linen in the pitiless laundry of the press. Some singers are born advertisers, some achieve advertising, but few have advertising thrust upon them. That sort usually fade into shadow-land rather than face the fierce white light which beats about the operatic throne. Really, it must be disconcerting for a woman singer to hear herself discussed as if she were a race-horse. Every point in her make-up is put on a platter ready to serve hot in the newspapers. You fancy yourself overhearing the conversation of jockeys and trainers. “Oi sye, Bill, that there filly is goin’ queer. Jest look at her fetlocks, and her crupper is gettin’ too heavy. Take her out for an hour’s spin on the downs. Breathe her a bit and then give her a hard sweatin’ run and a rub down. No water, Bill, mind ye, or I’ll knock yer block off.”

The private life of a prima donna is not unlike that of a racing mare’s. Flesh reduction, with all the succulent food—and champagne—are banished; indulgence spells decadence, and decadence is eagerly noted by the psychic detectives known as music-critics. We are not in the game to find fault as simple souls imagine, but to register values, vocal and personal. It’s a pity, but this is a condition and not a theory. We have heard of a Mary Garden cult. Now, as has been said by Dr. Wicksteed, a cult is always annoying to those who do not join in it, and generally hurtful to those who do. But is there such a Garden cult? We doubt it. She has a certain elect following, and for those admirers she can do no wrong. She has aroused the critical antagonism of some who, rightly enough, point out her obvious limitations. To these the gruff reply of Brahms is appropriate. A presuming youth called his attention to a theme in a work of his which was evidently borrowed from Mendelssohn. “That any fool can see,” said the crusty Johannes. The voice of Miss Garden is sometimes a voice in the wilderness: sandy, harsh, yet expressive. The same may be said of Geraldine Farrar, who every year is gravitating toward the zone, not of silence, but of the singing-actress. A Gallic, not an Italian zone. Voice does not play the major rôle; acting, that is, dramatic characterization, does. Not to recognize in Miss Garden the quintessence of this art—not altogether a new one, and its most perfect flowering is the art of Yvette Guilbert—is to miss the real Mary Garden. Voilà tout! We saw a like misunderstanding of Eleonora Duse. Immediately she was compared, and unfavorably, with Sarah Bernhardt, when she was achieving something vastly different, and, I think, vastly finer. Sarah was more brilliant, Duse more human; the one an orchestra, the other an exquisitely balanced string quartet. Mary Garden is the nearest approach to Duse on the lyric stage.

Mary Garden, too, is “different,” in the sense Stendhal meant that banal word. Her cadenced speech is not singing in the Italian manner. To begin with, her tonal texture is not luscious. But there are compensations. Every phrase is charged with significance. She paints with her voice, and if her palette is composed of the cooler tones, if the silver-greys and sombre greens of a Velasquez predominate, it is because she needs just such a gamut with which to load her brush. She is a consummate manipulator of values. To be sure, we do not expect the torrential outbursts of Margaret Matzenauer. Why confuse two antithetical propositions? I don’t look at one of the Paul Cézannes in the rare collection of Miss Lillie Bliss expecting the gorgeous hues of a Monticelli. Cézanne is a master of values. And if these similes seem far-fetched—which they are not; music and color are twins in the Seven Arts—then let us pitch upon a more homely illustration: Mary Garden is an opal, Margaret Matzenauer a full-blown rose. Voltaire said that the first man who compared a woman to a rose was a poet; the second, an ass. I hope Mme. Matzenauer will accept the simile in the poetic sense.

Nuance, which alone makes art or life endurable, becomes an evocation with Miss Garden. I lament that she is not in a more intimate setting, as the misted fire and rhythmic modulations of her opaline art and personality are lost in such a huge auditorium as the Lexington Theatre. I saw her, a slip of a girl, at Paris, early in this century, and framed by the Opéra Comique, of whose traditions she is now the most distinguished exponent. She was then something precious: a line of Pater’s prose, the glance of one of Da Vinci’s strange ladies; a chord by Debussy; honey, tiger’s blood, and absinthe; or like the enigmatic pallor we see in Renaissance portraits; cruel, voluptuous, and suggesting the ennui of Watteau’s L’Indifférent.

She is all things to all critics.

There are those who see in her the fascinating woman. And they are justified in their belief. There are those who discover in her something disquieting, ambiguous; one of Baudelaire’s “femmes damnées” from whom he fashioned his Beethovenian harmonies, fulgurating, profound: “Descendez le chemin de l’enfer éternel! ... flagellés par un vent qui ne vient pas du ciel.” ... And there is still another group to which I adhere, one that envisages Mary in the more lucid light of an admirable artist, who has fashioned of her body and soul a rare instrument, giving forth the lovely music of attitude, gesture, pose, and rhythm. There are moments when she evokes the image of the shadow of a humming-bird on a star; and often she sounds the shuddering semitones of sex, as in Thaïs. The Mélisande moods are hers, the dim, remote poesy of antique sonorous tapestries; and the “modern” note of Louise, grazing the vulgar, though purified by passion. But the dissenters no doubt believe in the Cambodian proverb when estimating the singing of both Geraldine Farrar and Mary Garden. It runs thus: When in Hades it is bad form to speak of the heat.

Do you remember the night when Mary Garden came from the refectory of the monastery in Le Jongleur, and—oh, the winsome little devil!—paused on the stairway to remark to her audience: “La cuisine est très bonne”?

The accent was indescribable. At Paris they admired her individual French streaked with exotic intonations. That night it revealed the universal accent of a half-starved lad who had just filled his tummy; a real “tuck-out.” The joy of life! How human she was! It is the sartorial technique of Miss Garden that is supreme. Her taste in costumes is impeccable. In the eternal game of making masculine eyes misbehave, she is quite irresistible. But this orchidaceous Circe, this uncommon or garden variety, does not with her fatal philtres transform men into the unmentionable animal; rather does she cause them to scurry after their vocabulary and lift up their voices in rhetorical praise. And that is something to have accomplished. Did you ever read Casuals of the Sea, by William McFee, a fiction I had the honor to introduce to the American reading public? On page 443 there occurs at the chapter end the following dialogue: “Mother!” “Yes, Minnie.” “Mother, I was just thinking what fools men are! What utter fools! But oh, mother, dear mother, what fools we are, not to find it out—sooner!” Minnie had seen a bit of life on the Continent; she was then snug in the land-locked harbor of stagnant matrimonial waters. But she understood men. Miss Garden is a profounder philosopher than Minnie Briscoe. She knew her public “sooner,” and the result is—Mary Garden. Qui a bu, boira!

I have been asked whether Miss Garden believes that she is the wonderful artiste I believe her to be. I really don’t know. But I feel assured that if she discovers she does not measure up to all the qualities ascribed to her she will promptly develop them; such is the plastic, involutionary force of this extraordinary woman.

IIITHE BABY, THE CRITIC, AND THE GUITAR

George Saintsbury, that blunt literary critic who always called a cat a cat, wrote a study of Charles Baudelaire in an English magazine at least forty years ago. It practically introduced the poet to English readers, although Swinburne had imported no little of the “poisonous honey from France” in Laus Veneris. Prof. Saintsbury told of a friend to whom he had shown the etching of François Flameng after Herrera’s The Baby and the Guitar. “So,” said the friend, “you like this picture. I always thought you hated babies!” The remark is a classic example of that sin against the holy ghost of criticism, the confusion of two widely varying intellectual substances; a mixing up of the babies with a vengeance. The anecdote may serve to point a moral if not to adorn my sermon.