December 26, 1918 
LAND &' WATER 
15 
Life and Letters ^ J. C Squize 
A German Genius 
PEOPLE often try to write books about geniuses. 
They are usually very boring books, and the 
geniuses are not at all geniuses, but merely 
irritating poseurs with artistic tastes and a tech- 
nical knack which we have usually to take on trust. 
Miss Romer Wilson's Martin Schuler (Methuen, ys. net) is 
the first book about a genius that I have ever read which 
has really interested me. 
****** 
The career of Jlartin Schuler is short. We first meet him 
at Heidelberg, poor and self-confident ; indifferent to the 
death of the friend who supplies him with the libretto for a 
great opera and to the fate of an amiable giri whom he casually 
seduces in a wood ; but intoxicated by the ancient streets, 
the hill, the wide prospect of river and wood, the town.slecpirg 
under the moon. He goes to Leipzig, where he meets Hella 
von Rosenthal, who is irresistibly drawn to him, and spends 
a luxurious year in Switzeriand with him ; he breaks with 
her, becomes a fashionable young man in Beriin, forms an 
alliance with a beautiful young woman whose husband is in 
the East, grows sick of" the crowds, parties, horses, and 
clothes, 'flies to a Bavarian solitude surrounded by lakes 
■ and woods, composes his masterpiece there, and dies at 
the first performance. 
****** 
This is the " plot." It is very like the plot of other novels 
about "erratic geniuses." They usually have a succession 
of love affairs ; and I dare say that they often die in the 
moment of triumph— a banal conception that Miss Wilson, 
who is usually at least exempt from the charge of banality, 
might have avoided. The book is a short one, and I cannot 
say that Martin Schuler's actions are to me made quite 
convincing. Miss Wilson jumps difficulties. If Schuler was 
at all a sensitive or sympathetic person he must have felt 
something when parting with Hella and afterwards, con- 
sidering that he had spent a year with her ; if (and this is 
the presumption from the general sketch of him) he was 
not, it is most unlikely that he would have remained with her 
for more than a week. He is represented as completely selfish, 
not very sensual, physically attractive to the other charac- 
ters (so the author contends), but repellent to the reader. 
He reads nothing and has no interest in ideas ; he has nothing 
to say in conversation. He is not, in fact, to my^thinking, 
at all a type of the genius, whether literary, pictorial, or 
musical. The genius is usually anything but Bismarckian 
in his relations with other people ; he suffers on accoimt of 
those relations, however he may mismanage tjiem. If he 
does trample on other people, he is usually certain, and 
prepared by argument to demonstrate it, that he is justified ; 
his personal experiences colour his work, and he is full of ideas. 
Wagner's ideas may have been second-hand, but he had 
plenty ; Turner's verse may have been balderdash, hut it 
was very emphatic. Martin Schuler is altogether too ele- 
mental and inhuman ; he is imagination without intellect ; 
he has a personality yet no interest in personalities ; his 
genius lives in a closed compartment ; his inspiration has 
nothing human in it. The picture seems to me an impossible 
one. But Miss Wilson almost palms it off on us. 
****** 
For she has two conspicuous merits. The first is that 
remarkable visualising power which enables her to "palin 
off" an imperfectly conceived character as a real one. Par- 
ticular aspects and scenes arc flashed before us- with extra- 
ordinary vividness. "This man," we think, "must exist, 
for we have just seen a photograph of him." Miss Wilson 
never wastes words. But whether describing the houses 
of old Heidelberg, a party sitting round a candle-lit table- 
cloth, the moon on the Rhine, a motor-car journey through 
wet woods at night, a frozen lake covered with snow, the 
inside of a theatre, a Swiss valleyjn spring, she brings the 
scene before us in the few exact sentences that makes it as 
"real" to us as if we had seen it ourselves. I do not know 
any episode in any book more vividly described than Martin's 
motor-car ride from Berlin to Bavaria ; the rain, the endless 
fir-trees, the hait on a bridge at midnight with a mumbling 
group of villagers on the fringe of the lamp-light, and the 
other halt at dawn where Martin emerged to stretch himself 
and climbed a hill-top whence he rrmld survey hundreds of 
miles of country an lying at his feet in tne wan hght, and all, 
as it were, in his power. This burning vividness extends 
to the rendering of physical as well as visual sensations. 
When Martin is flooded with a great idea "waves of sensation 
passed from his head, the seat of imagination, to his abdomen, 
the seat of the knowledge of pleasure" ; and when he meets 
again Steinbach, the friend with whom he has broken, 
"In spite of the terrible tension and of the sounds in their 
ears of ugly ringing and booming bells, they both had a 
desire to make an effort of friendship, but not the will." 
One could quote scores of passages of these kinds, such as 
the sentence about Martin riding down the Tiergarten when 
"The trees formed long parallel lines before him, between 
which ran the ever-narrowing roadway, to which a thin 
sprinkling of people seemed to be glued, so constant was 
their number upon it." It is like looking at the pictures 
of a new artist who is thoroughly realistic, but who neverthe- 
less sees reality in such a way that his glimpses of the world 
seem as novel as they are familiar. 
****** 
And her other notably and much greater quality is lier 
knowledge of how the creative imagination works. She 
may not have given us a convincing picture of Martin 
Schuler ; but she knows something about imaginative genius, . 
for she has it herself.' She knows the blindnesses and the 
revelations, the contacts with the eternal and the infinite, 
the possessions and the relapses, and, above all, the way 
in which the imagination is fed by the scents, sounds, and 
sights of the material world, taken in keenly and consciously 
or quite unconsciously, and working in the darkness of the 
brain until they spring to life in new forms and new com- 
binations through the medium which is natural to the indivi- 
dual. Her Martin Schuler may or may not have been a 
great artist ; but if he was not, it is the imagination and the 
working methods of a great artist which she has imputed to 
him. She tells us very little about the conception and the 
composition cf Schuler's great opera. The Peahens, but she 
convinces us that there is a marvellous .opera in her brain 
if not in his. She has, and she knows, the poetic faculty ; she is 
as familiar with its operation in a musical as in a literary 
mind ; and one awaits her next book with a keenness of 
expectation that has not been aroused by many books far 
more elaborate, and, with regard to the unfolding of character 
and the invention of incidents, far more logical and con- 
vincing. 
-- ****** 
Finally, she has said the best that can be said for the 
spirit of the old Germany, still largely present in the new 
Germany. Her Germans are not, to us, attractive people ; 
the only likeable man in the book (the women are more 
amiable) is the consumptive W'erner, who is a Rhinelander, 
and strikes one as being French. Schuler, Steinbach, the 
young Heidelbergers, the theatre-director, the Prussian 
aristocrats and business men, are all, to English feelings, 
'gross and ugly ; and a Cabinet Minister, to whom the 
author is not unsympathetic, spits cherry-stones upon a 
drawing-room carpet. In the act of ejection, he thinks of 
lovers and the moon ; he is profoundly musical and philoso- 
phical. The misfortune is that his romanticism probably 
bore no relation to his conduct of affairs, which was no doubt 
grotesquely logical and ruthlessly "realistic"; and that his 
sensibility did not modify his oianners, which were those of 
a hog. But we feel in him, as in all the others, a great 
capacity for emotional and imaginative experience, which, 
given more civilisation and a sens.e of humour, would 
produce tremendous results. "Give me," says one, 
"some more beer. Perhaps another mug will send me 
slobbering into Paradise." And they all somehow, how- 
ever ungainly, seem a part of the old romantic German 
—it is South German, and dull, flat Prussia has no 
share in it — background of castles and fir-woods, elves 
and fairies, witches, spectres, yearnings and folk-songs. 
The character of a people and the atmosphere of a 
country are got into the few short chapters of this 
book. WTiether Miss Wilson likes or dislikes the Germans, 
and even whether she likes or dislikes her hero, remains 
completely uncertain ; yet she interests one so acutely 
and unintermittently that one is exasperated when her 
book ends — and with so unworthy a cinema trick as a 
death in a box at a first night. 
