Robert Haven Schauffler

It is only in a surrounding of personalities that personalities can as such make themselves seen and heard.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

etween 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 coÖperation 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 amoebÆ; 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":

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"—

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 CÆsar? Who was MoliÈre'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.

But that silent song was the direct inspiration of much of the sublimest music of the centuries to come. And so we might go on and on about this Master of all vicarious masters.

Yet it is a strange and touching thing to note that even his exuberant creativeness sometimes needed the refreshment of silent partners. When He was at last to perform a great action in his own right He looked about for support and found a master by proxy in Mary, the sister of the practical Martha. But when He turned for help in uttermost need to his best-beloved disciples He found them only negative, destructive influences. This accounts for the anguish of his reproach: "Could ye not watch with me one hour?"

Having never been properly recognized as such, the world's masters by proxy have never yet been suitably rewarded. Now the world is convinced that its acknowledged masters deserve more of a feast at life's surprise party than they can bring along for themselves in their own baskets. So the world bows them to the places of honor at the banquet board. True, the invitation sometimes comes so late that the master has long since devoured everything in his basket and is dead of starvation. But that makes not the slightest difference to humanity, which will take no refusal, and props the cynically amused skeleton up at the board next the toastmaster. My point is, however, that humanity is often forehanded enough with its invitations to give the masters a charming time of it before they, too, into the dust descend, sans wine, sans song, etc. But I do not know that it has ever yet consciously bidden a master by proxy—as such—to the feast. And I contend that if a man's deserts are to be measured at all by his creativeness, then the great masters by proxy deserve seats well up above the salt.

For is it any less praiseworthy to make a master than to make a masterpiece? I grant that the masterpiece is the more sudden and dramatic in appearing and can be made immediate use of, whereas the master is slowly formed, and even then turns out unsatisfactory in many ways. He is apt to be that well-known and inconvenient sort of person who, when he comes in out of the rain to dress for his wedding, abstractedly prepares to retire instead, and then, still more abstractedly, puts his umbrella to bed and stands himself in the corner. All the same, it is no less divine to create a master by slow, laborious methods than to snatch a masterpiece apparently out of nothing-at-all. In the eye of the evolutionist, man is not of any the less value because he was made by painful degrees instead of having been produced, a perfect gentleman, out of the void somewhat as the magician brings forth from the empty saucepan an omelette, containing a live pigeon with the loaned wedding-ring in its beak.

The master-makers have long been expending their share of the power. It is high time they were enjoying their share of the glory. What an unconscionable leveling up and down there will presently be when it dawns upon humanity what a large though inglorious share it has been having in the spiritually creative work of the world! In that day the seats of the mighty individualists of science, industry, politics, and discovery; of religion and its ancient foe ecclesiasticism; of economy, the arts and philosophy, will all be taken down a peg by the same knowledge that shall exalt "them of low degree."

I can imagine how angrily ruffled the sallow shade of Arthur Schopenhauer will become at the dawn of this spiritual Commune. When the first full notes of the soul's "Marseillaise" burst upon his irritable eardrums, I can hear above them his savage snarl. I can see his malignant expression as he is forced to divide his unearned increment of fame with some of those Mitmenschen whom he, like a bad Samaritan, loved to lash with his tongue before pouring in oil of vitriol and the sour wine of sadness. And how like red-ragged turkey-cocks Lord Byron and Nietzsche and Napoleon will puff out when required to stand and deliver some of their precious credit!

There will be compensations, though, to the genius who, safely dead, feels himself suddenly despoiled of a fullness of fame which he had counted on enjoying in sÆcula sÆculorum. When he comes to balance things up, perhaps he will not, after all, find the net loss so serious. Though he lose some credit for his successes, he will also lose some discredit for his failures. Humanity will recognize that while the good angels of genius are the masters by proxy, the bad angels of genius exert an influence as negative and destructive as the influence of the others is positive and constructive.

How jolly it will be, for all but the bad angels, when we can assign to them such failures as Browning's "The Inn Album"; Davy's contention that iodine was not an element, and Luther's savage hounding of the nobles upon the wretched peasants who had risen in revolt under his own inspiration. But enough of the bad angels! Let us inter them with this epitaph: "They did their worst; devils could do no more."

Turn we to the bright side of the situation. How delighted Keats will be when at last the world develops a little sense of proportion, and after first neglecting and then over-praising him, finally proposes to give poor old Severn his due as a master by proxy. Imagine Sir William Herschel's pleasure when his beloved sister Caroline begins to receive her full deserts. And Tschaikowsky will slough his morbidness and improvise a Slavic Hallelujah Chorus when his unseen patroness comes into her own. It is true that the world has already given her memory two fingers and a perfunctory "thank ye." This was for putting her purse at Tschaikowsky's disposal, thus making it possible for him to write a few immortal compositions instead of teaching mortals the piano in a maddening conservatory. But now, glory! hallelujah! the world is soon going to render her honor long overdue for the spiritual support which so ably reinforced the financial.

And Sir Thomas More, that early socialist—imagine his elation! For he will regard our desire to transfer some of his own credit to the man in the pre-Elizabethan street as a sure sign that we are steadily approaching the golden gates of his Utopia. For good Sir Thomas knows that our view of heroes and hero-worship has always been too little democratic. We have been over-inclined, with the aristocratic Carlyle, to see all history as a procession of a few transcendent masters surrounded, preceded, and followed by enormous herds of abject and quite insignificant slaves. Between these slaves and the masters, there is, in the old view, about as much similarity as exists in the child's imagination between the overwhelming dose of castor oil and the single pluperfect chocolate drop whereby the dose is supposed to be made endurable. Already the idea is beginning to glimmer that heroic stuff is far more evenly distributed throughout the throng than we had supposed.

It is, of course, very meet and very right and our bounden duty to admire the world's standard, official heroes. But it is wrong to revere them to the exclusion of folk less showy but perhaps no less essential. It is almost as wrong as it would be for the judges at the horse-show to put the dog-cart before the horse and then focus their admiring glances so exclusively upon the vehicle that they forgot the very existence of its patient and unself-conscious propeller.

It is especially fitting that we should awake to the worth of the master by proxy just now, when the movement for the socialization of the world, after so many ineffectual centuries, is beginning to engage the serious attention of mankind. Thus far, one of the chief reactionary arguments against all men being free has been that men are so shockingly unequal. And the reactionaries have called us to witness the gulf that yawns, for example, between the god-like individualist, Ysaye, and the worm-like little factory girl down there in the audience balanced on the edge of the seat and listening to the violin—her rapt soul sitting in her eyes. Now, however, we know that, but for the wireless tribute of creativeness that flashes up to the monarch of tone from that "rapt soul" and others as humble and as rapt—the king of fiddlers would then and there be obliged to lay down his horsehair scepter and abdicate.

We have reached a stage of social evolution where it is high time that one foolish old fallacy should share the fate of the now partially discredited belief that "genius will out" in spite of man or devil. This fallacy is the supposition that man's creativeness is to be measured solely by its visible, audible, or tangible results. Browning's old Rabbi made a shrewd commentary on this question when he declared:

Yes, we are being slowly socialized, even to our way of regarding genius; and this has been until now the last unchallenged stronghold of individualism. We perceive that even there individualism must no longer be allowed to have it all its own way. After a century we are beginning to realize that the truth was in our first socially minded English poet when he sang:

To-day we have in library, museum, gallery, and cathedral tangible records of the creativeness of the world's masters. Soon I think we are to possess—thanks to Edison and the cinematographers—intangible records—or at least suggestions—of the modest creativeness of our masters by proxy. Some day every son with this inspiring sort of mother will have as complete means as science and his purse affords, of perpetuating her voice, her changing look, her walk, her tender smile. Thus he may keep at least a gleam of her essential creativeness always at hand for help in the hour of need.

I would give almost anything if I could have in a storage battery beside me now some of the electric current that was forever flowing out of my own mother, or out of Richard Watson Gilder, or out of Hayd Sampson, a glorious old "inglorious Milton" of a master by proxy whom I once found toiling in a small livery-stable in Minnesota. My faith is firm that some such miracle will one day be performed. And in our irreverent, Yankee way we may perhaps call the captured product of the master by proxy—"canned virtue." In that event the twenty-first centurion will no more think of setting out on a difficult task or for a God-forsaken environment without a supply of "canned virtue" than of starting for one of the poles equipped with only a pocketful of pemmican.

There is a grievous amount of latent master-making talent spoiling to-day for want of development. Many an one feels creative energy crying aloud within himself for vicarious spiritual expression. He would be a master by proxy, yet is at a loss how to learn. Him I would recommend to try learning the easiest form of the art. Let him resolve to become a creative listener to music. Once he is able to influence reproducers of art like pianists and singers, he can then begin groping by analogy toward the more difficult art of influencing directly the world's creators. But even if he finds himself quite lacking in creativeness, he can still be a silent partner of genius if he will relax purse-strings, or cause them to be relaxed, for the founding of creative fellowships.

I do not know if ever yet in the history of the planet the mighty force which resides in the masters by proxy has been systematically used. I am sure it has never been systematically conserved, and that it is one of the least understood and least developed of earth's natural resources. One of our next long steps forward should be along this line of the conservation of "virtue." The last physical frontier has practically been passed. Now let us turn to the undiscovered continents of soul which have so long been awaiting their Columbuses and Daniel Boones, their country-life commissions and conferences of governors.

When the hundredth part of you possible masters by proxy shall grow aware of your possibilities, and take your light from under the bushel, and use it to reinforce the flickering flame of talent at your elbow, or to illumine the path of some unfortunate and stumbling genius, or to heighten the brilliance of the consummate master—our civilization will take a mighty step towards God.

Try it, my masters!

THE END