A SYNTHESIS OF THE SEVEN ARTS Nothing new in all this talk about a fusion of the Seven Arts; it has been tried for centuries. Richard Wagner's attempt just grazed success, though the æsthetic principle at the base of his theory is eminently unsound. Pictures, sculpture, tone, acting, poetry, and the rest are to be found in the Wagnerian music-drama; but the very titles are significant--a hybrid art is there. With Wagner music is the master. His poetry, his drama, are not so important, though his scenic sense is unfailing. Every one of his works delights the eye; truly moving pictures. Yet if the lips of the young man of Urbino had opened to music, they would have sung the melodies of the young man of Salzburg. Years ago Sadikichi Hartmann, the Japanese poet from Hamburg, made a bold attempt in this direction, adding to other ingredients of the sensuous stew, perfume. The affair came off at Carnegie Hall, and we were wafted on the wings of song and smell to Japan--only I detected the familiar odour of old shoes and the scent of armpits--of the latter Walt Whitman has triumphantly sung. A New York audience is not as pleasant to the nostrils as a Japanese crowd. That Mr. Finck has assured us. In the Théâtre d'art, Paris, and in the last decade of the last century, experiments were made with all the arts--except the art of the palate. Recently, Mary Hallock, a Philadelphia pianist, has invented a mixture of music, lights, and costumes; for instance, in a certain Debussy piece, the stage assumes a deep violet hue, which glides into a light purple. The Turkish March of Mozart is depicted in deep "reds, yellows, and greens." Philip Hale, the Boston music-critic, has written learnedly on the relation of tones and colours, and that astonishing poet, Arthur Rimbaud, in his Alchimie du Verbe, tells us: "I believe in all the enchantments. I invented the colour of the vowels: A, black; E, white; I, red; O, blue; U, green." This scheme he set forth in his famous sonnet, Voyelles, which was only a mystification to catch the ears of credulous ones. René de Ghil invented an entirely new system of prosody, which no one understood; least of all, the poet. I wrote a story, The Piper of Dreams (in Melomaniacs), to prove that music and the violet rays combined might prove deadly in the hands of an anarch composer like Illowski--or Richard Strauss. And now New York has enjoyed its first Light Symphony, by Alexander Scriabine. It was played by the Russian Symphony Orchestra under the suave conductorship of Modeste Altschuler (who is so Jacobean), while his brother Jacob (who is so modest) sat at the keyboard and pressed down the keys which regulated the various tintings on a screen; a wholly superfluous proceeding, as the colours did not mollify the truculence of the score; indeed, were quite meaningless, though not optically unpleasant. I admired this Russian, Scriabine, ever since I heard Josef Hofmann play a piano of his étude in D sharp minor.