ANTON RUBINSTEIN.*
THE prevailing craze for antedating everything finds one of its least satisfactory outcomes in the practice of compiling biographies of celebrities who are still alive. Such productions are, as a rule, void of all real value, because the writers are impelled to undertake them either by extravagant enthusiasm, or, as sometimes happens, by vindictive animosity. No philo- sophically minded person would think of sitting down to pass judgment on the character or works of a man who is still in his prime; yet this is what Mr. McArthur, impatient of delay, and disdaining the Solonian maxim, has boldly attempted in the volume before us. And seeing that he is an unscholarly, illiterate, and slovenly writer, with a great capacity for gush and a considerable disregard for grammar, it is not to be wondered at that he has produced a book destitute of any positive merit save that of brevity.
To begin with, Mr. McArthur manages to convey—obviously without intending it—a very unfavourable picture of the great composer's ancestry. When the Czar for the time being issued an ukase directed against the Jews, Rubinstein's grandfather at once gathered all his family around him, and commanded them to be baptised, for, as he said sarcastically, "better undergo the ordeal of holy-water and chrism and become Christians—if holy-water and chrism would make them Christians—than lose their wealth." The only notable point we glean from Mr. McArthur's account of Rubinstein's youth is that though of a musical race, he did not spring from a specially musical stock. After creating a considerable sensation as a prodigy, Rubinstein got, as it were, into a backwater, and after failing to make his way at Berlin or Vienna, gravitated to St. Peters- burg, and speedily won favour in the Russian capital. By the time he was twenty-three, he was recognised on all sides as a superlative artist, whether as executant or composer. In 1854 he went on his second European tour, the most notable and agreeable feature about which was his meeting with Liszt at Rotterdam. Both artists were engaged for the musical festival there, lived at the same hotel, and consorted together on terms of the greatest friendliness. In 1857 he visited England again, and the attitude of the public towards him is reflected in the following characteristic paragraph. Mr. McArthur has just described the en- thusiasm awakened by Rubinstein's performance, and continues as follows :—" At the same time, there were certain critics in London who wrote in disparagement; but all their zeal was but spilt ink, for nothing could efface his splendid genius ; and the mediocre talent they were farm- ing, the cause of their onslaught on Rubinstein as well as Liszt also, quietly but surely got sent to the level it merited, and taken down from the height it assumed." During the visit a rather amusing episode occurred. Rubinstein brought with him a letter of introduction to the Court, but its con- tents cannot have been very explicit, for when he called on Prince Albert, he was mistaken for a secret agent of the Russian Court coming to London in the disguise of a musician. In 1862, the St. Petersburg Conservatoire was founded -at his A:iton Rubinstein a Rivraphical Sketch. By Alexander McArthur. Edinburgh : Adam and Charles Black. instigation, and for some time he acted as its director. In 1865 he married, and, resigning his directorship in 1867, once more embraced the career of the travelling virtumw. Five years later, he crossed the Atlantic, or, as it is quaintly but succinctly expressed by Mr. McArthur : "In 1872, during the early weeks of September, he started for America, where he appeared in 215 concerts, and composed variations to the tune of Yankee Doodle." Wherever he has gone, his audiences have been " wildly " enthusiastic. Of late years Rubinstein has been less of a roamer, and since resuming his sway at the Conservatoire, has devoted a great deal of his time to the supervision of that institution. His chief grievances, according to his biographer, are that he is not fully appreciated in Russia, and that he has a stationary income. Hence his periodical tours, which he frankly owns are undertaken from pecuniary motives. As to the lack of appreciation, it is rather hard to reconcile Mr. McArthur's statements in the earlier with those in the later chapters of the book. We are told on p. 31 that by 1854 "he had reached the summit of all possible ambition as pianist and composer, and all St. Petersburg enthusiastically acknowledged this." On the occasion of his jubilee, which took place last November, a gold medal specially struck by the Imperial Society of Music was presented to him ; and in addition to this and other honorary distinctions, a pension of 2300 a year was conferred on him by the Czar. And yet we are told, a few pages later, that his coming to Russia was one of the most unfortunate steps of his life. "Fame and honour and glory he has received in Russia and from Russia, but the field for his labours has been too small His place was in Ger- many, and had he remained in Germany he would now be a greater man, a happier one, and one better understood." We are so far from agreeing with Mr. McArthur on this point as to hold that Rubinstein's extraordinary ability as an execu- tant has secured for his original compositions a far more favourable hearing on the Continent than their intrinsic merits deserve. As a song-writer, he has undoubtedly done work that deserves to live ; but in the more complicated depart- ments of composition his creations are too often disfigured by touches of downright tawdriness. It is sheer blasphemy to say, as Mr. McArthur does, that in all Rubinstein's works the Schubertian vein of melody is discernible. Some critics have affected to discover a bourgeois element in Schubert, but at least he is free from the atmosphere of the circus. For clever, sensuous vulgarity in symphonic and dramatic music, Rubin- stein has no equal, unless it be Goldmark. But although Mr. McArthur is an idolater, he has occasional lucid intervals, in which he timorously adopts an attitude of quasi-criticism. In one rhapsodic passage he declares that "even to wrong notes Rubinstein can give, and generally gives, a conception, a form, an ideal." But a few pages later he retracts this, and actually goes the length of censuring those critics who maintain that the wrong notes of Rubinstein are better than the right notes of others. "Wrong notes," adds Mr. McArthur, "are wrong notes, and inexcusable." In another place he expresses disapproval of his hero's treatment of the Song of Solomon in Sulamith, and for the rest may be credited with a glimmering perception of the fact that Rubinstein—who "looks for nothing beyond this life," and whose favourite novelist is Zola—is hardly the sort of man to realise his pet scheme of a sacred opera. So far as one can form any definite idea of the personality of the great pianist from Mr. McArthur's patchy memoir, he is by no means to be envied. He has been borne on the mid flood of fame for fifty years, and remains restless, dissatisfied, and blase. He is, according to his admirer, more unhappy than Beethoven or Chopin or Schumann. He is a humorist, but his prevailing moods are those of despondency, and his pleasantries have in them a good deal of Russian bearishness,
or even Tartaric acid. What most Englishmen would regard as the finest trait in his character—his continuous refusal to sue for patronage—strikes his present biographer in the light of a weakness. This much, however, must fairly be conceded, that, with all his want of taste and spirituality, there is a robust humanity about Rubinstein that extorts the respect of all with whom he is brought into contact. He is a man whom one may dislike, but whom one cannot despise.
Mr. McArthur's pages abound in errors, typographical and otherwise. He twice misquotes the name of Schumann's paper as the Afusik Zeitung, whereas it was the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. On p. 11 we are told that Malibran held the boards when Rubinstein set out on his first tour in 1841-42. As a matter of fact, that extraordinarily gifted woman died in 1836. It is rather misleading, again, to say that Liszt and Rubinstein were both young men in 1854, when Liszt was already old enough to have been Rubinstein's father. The statement that "Wagner, after having been derided, scorned, and neglected all through his youth and manhood, got himself heard at length in his old age," can only have proceeded from sheer ignorance. In the programmes of Rubinstein's historic recitals occur two of the most grotesque misprints that we have seen for a long time : Heuselt's "Si oiseau fdtais " is transformed into "Et oiseau Jetuis ;" while the last entry but one stands thus, " Teusllet N. Album." At first we thought this might be Russian, but eventually decided that it must be merely a perversion of the innocent title, " Feuillet d'Album." Mr. McArthur's scholarly and historical equipment is suffi- ciently illustrated by his alluding to "the exoteric few" (p. 78), and by his informing us (p. 82) that "history tell us of that enigma of all times, the condemnation of Socrates through the Clouds of Aristopha,nes." The chapter on Rubinstein's villa at Peterhof is embellished by a profusion of naïve remarks and downright solecisms. For instance, we are told that the villa has, "of course, nothing baronial about it." Why should it ? Then there is a delicious bit about the surrounding scenery, and the meadows, and the cows "chewing their ends ;" and, best of all, a description of the composer's own room, in which, after enumerating writing-table, grand piano- forte, music-stands, divan, bust, statuette, carpet, and chairs, the author winds up by the remark that otherwise it contains no furniture. Rubinstein's demeanour to the world at large is summed up in the following lovely jumble of deranged epithets :—" In public life Rubinstein is simple and unaffected, very courteous, and always at his ease, although self-conscious, ready at any time to be of use where he can, and a little old- fashioned in his punctilious attention to trifles."
In fine, this is a bad book, though its badness is harmless, and even amusing. It is free from that spice of personality with which works of this sort are nowadays so freely flavoured. Mr. McArthur abstains from telling us, for example, whether Rubinstein takes sugar in his tea or wears Dr. Jaeger's sanitary underclothing. And ,for this we ought to be thankful. Of the three portraits, that of Rubinstein, at the age of twelve, is by far the most interesting. The recently executed medallion brings out the animal traits in his physiognomy to the eclipse of the intellectual.
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