Musician and Mystic
O'Sheel, Shaemas
FRANCIS GRIERSON may have died much less perturbed by the appalling poverty of his last days than are those who knew and loved him and his work, from whom he hid his plight, and who learn the...
...The word "souvenirs" is the most frequent characteristic word in all his writings, for he properly valued the great experiences which had fed his mind, and cherished his great moments as frankly as a child...
...The great of the earth who were his familiars in his heyday have gone as he has gone...
...He considered it man's business to know the things that concern man's soul and destiny...
...He was, however, no scholar emulous of the bookworm...
...FRANCIS GRIERSON may have died much less perturbed by the appalling poverty of his last days than are those who knew and loved him and his work, from whom he hid his plight, and who learn the truth too late...
...He did not reject earth and time and embodied humanity in order to believe in heaven and eternity and the soul...
...Grierson compared the agnostic to a general who, command ing an army, admits that he knows nothing of the strength and movements of the enemy...
...Grierson's uncanny power resided less in his amazing hands, with their stretch of an octave and a half, than in his calm mystical confidence that although he was unable to learn musical notation, he could sit down at a piano and create music...
...The succession of his nine other books discloses him firm in his faith throughout a long life...
...His profound reading, in The Valley of Shadows, of the spiritual overtones of crude frontier life in western America of the 1850's, is so veracious as to exclude any doubt that even in childhood he was a mystic...
...The case is not so good for this world, this country and this age which let Francis Grierson die such a death...
...The thing that brought Grierson his earliest and most of his contemporary fame was his perhaps unique power not only of improvising on the piano, but of improvising music which stood comparison with the compositions of the masters...
...To one who believed in "a realm of the mind beyond the limits of category," one always serenely free from the superstition that the visible and tangible world is all, doubtless it did not matter if IXK Angeles, whither he went for health, was the very shrine of the tangible, the loud, the speedy and the glittering...
...he had always a bright lance in rest for contemporary art and thought, and he compared the man who studies only the past to one who would refuse living guests because all the rooms in his house were crowded with mummies...
...doubtless it did not matter so much that he, once the astonishment of Parisian salons and the honored guest of royalty, lay dying, a forgotten old man...
...though he covered need with the mantle of pride, we should have seen to it that, in the shadow of HoU5rwood, where millions are paid for the gaudiest and most ignorant travesties on human life, this man who had summoned thought out of the deeps to be a kind of motion picture of the eternal mysteries projected against the screen of the material world, should have had at least the security of the anchorite in his cell...
...The thread of his thought ran rather tenuously through a style of easy distinction, somewhat like the insouciance of Symons, less artful than Maeterlinck, less gemmed and pointed than Emerson, yet not unstudded with such striking figurative expressions as "Truth itself is sometimes like a ruddy apple which requires to be cut in halves before we can tell which portion contains the worm...
...But Francis Grierson's books will live and grow in stature as surely as all wise, true and gracious work comes to its own at last...
...The country about whose most epic period he wrote the greatest book (The Valley of Shadows) let him die alone and impoverished...
...The same spirit informs his books, which surely rank with the greatest testaments of mystic faith in modem times...
...But though he had to pawn a watch given him by a king of England, the souvenirs of his memory could not be taken from him, no matter how harsh the hand of fate...
...He summoned his thoughts about the eternal verities, sometimes penetrating to the point of vision, by contemplating books—from Shakespeare to Uncle Remus—and men, and visible nature, and the arts, and ideas of which others would have seen only the material significance...
...Grierson was a mystic but not a "misty...
...adding pithily, "It is his business to know...
...This was surely the most evanescent of all arts, more evanescent than the art of other virtuosi, since it left no written score after the last echo died...
...Though he hid, we should have found him out...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 7
