CRUSTS & CRUMBS, 1919.

Continuing my exploration of the Villa Montezuma and her creator, Jesse Shepard, I present this article from 1919. It discusses prevailing attitudes toward Frances Grierson and his writings.

To learn more about the early days of the Villa Montezuma: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QXTMPJQ

 

Good Evening.

 

From the Toronto Star, August 03, 1919, pg 8.

 

CRUSTS AND CRUMBS

By

Albert Ernest Stafford

 

For some weeks Toronto has been the hostess of Frances Grierson. This may not mean much to thoughtless people, no more, probably, than if one said Toronto has been hostess to Maeterlinck. But it will be remembered and recorded in the future that Francis Grierson spent the summer of 1919 in Toronto. He has lived so much of his life in London, Paris, New York, Petrograd and other great centres, one might fancy Toronto had nothing to offer to such a cosmopolitan. To the contrary, Mr. Grierson says he had an inner intimation that he as to come to Toronto, and that he would find it a great spiritual centre, and a place of importance in the new world that is to be. A greater than Maeterlinck is here; one who has a surer touch, a steadier pulse, a keener vision, a soul that stands near the Real. If Toronto has a gift for the world Mr. Grierson must reveal it, as he has already lifted the veil of so many modern mysteries. For Mr. Grierson is a prophet, as he showed the world in 1913 in “The Invincible Alliance,” when he foretold the Prussian march over civilization and its method, and, relying on his own prediction, left Europe for America. This, at least, impresses the public, and yet it is one of the least of his literary and spiritual feats. It raises the old problem as to which is easier: to say, thy sins be forgiven thee, or, arise, take up thy bed and walk! The public will always be on the outside of such problems, but the mind of the prophet and the power of the magician cannot be dissevered. It is the mind of the prophet that is most to be honoured, or as Kipling has it from another angle, “The game is greater than the player of the game. And the ship is more than the crew.” Mr. Grierson came before the world in 1889 with his first volume of essays. It was in French, and he writes French like an Academician, as Henri de Regnier, Jules Simon, Paul Bourget, Sully Prudhomme, Stephane Mallarme and others have testified. It has been disputed whether he writes better French or English. Only Maeterlinck challenges his rank as the greatest living essayist. Francis Grierson in 1889 appeared as a re-embodiment of Benjamin Henry Jesse Francis Shepard, who was born in September, 1848 and who had become known as “a pianist with a gift of improvisation transcending anything known in the world of music.”

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Francis Grierson was in 1889 an unknown and almost anonymous writer. Francis Shepard would have been read for his musical reputation. The new name gained a new distinction. In 1899, when “Modern Mysticism” was published in London, the literary world at once acclaimed the writer. Only a few of his friends were aware that Grierson was Francis Shepard’s mother’s name, and that he had been born at 15 Princess Street, Birkenhead, Cheshire, in September 1848. The Shepards are an old Cumberland family, Rev. Thomas Shepard being one of the best known as the founder of Harvard. Joseph Shepard , Francis’ father, emigrated to Illinois in 1849, became an American citizen, and a friend of Abraham Lincoln. After 22 years he returned to London with his wife and daughter, the latter now Mrs. Vance, wife of the Archdeacon of Limerick. Joseph Shepard died in 1895, at the age of 89. His wife was Emily Grierson, born in Kingstown, Ireland. Her mother, before her marriage to Col. Grierson, was Miss Smith of Golden Bridge House, near Dublin, and closely related to Field Marshal Lord Wolseley. General James Moncrieff Grierson, who died suddenly when on his way to the front, and General Grierson, the famous cavalry leader in the American Civil War, were cousins of Mrs. Shepard. She was remarkable for her personal charm and saintly character. When she arrived in Illinois in 1849 her beauty attracted attention, and her hospitality and devotion to the sick and needy were known throughout the Lincoln country. The Griersons have been famous in Scotland since Gilbert Macgregor, or Gregorson, second son of Malcolm, eleventh Lord of Macgregor, who died in 1374, took the name of Grierson, being Lord of Airde and Lag. Annie Laurie was a granddaughter of Agnes Grierson, and the first of the “marriage stones” let into the outer walls of Maxwelton House bears the date 1641, and the initials of John Laurie and Agnes Grierson, Annie Laurie’s grandparents. The present head of the house in the twentieth generation is Sir Robert Gilbert White Grierson, Bart., Rockhall, Dumfries-shire, captain in the King’s Own Borderers in the recent war. The Griersons have been distinguished for mystical gifts, and faculties through the centuries. It is into such an unusual heredity, which provides the physical mould, that genius often incarnates and pours the rare elixir, distilled out of many previous lives, which inspires and vitalizes its own and succeeding generations.

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There appeared then in due order the series of volumes which give Francis Grierson a permanent place in literature, “Modern Mysticism,” which took London by storm; “The Keltic Temperament,” which Prof. William James found “full of wisdom”; “The Valley of Shadows,” upon which he worked for eight years, which was published in 1909, and justifies Maeterlinck’s discerning comment on “the limpidity of his shadows”; “Parisian Portraits,” a record of his intimacy with the brilliant leaders of literature and art in the Second Empire and the later Republic; “The Humour of the Underman,” which the author is inclined to think is his best book; “La Vie et Les Hommes,” written in French, received with a chorus of approval from the greatest French critics; “The Invincible Alliance,” in which like a new John Baptist he prophesies the Kingdom of Heaven present and immediate, and “The Agnostic Agony,” blind “at the beginning of a cycle of invisible forces”; and lastly, “Illusions and Realities of the Great War,” which is the gospel of sanity preached to a mad world. I have been told by many people that a great teacher is to come, but I am more concerned about the great teachers who are here. There is more practical wisdom, more inspiration, more spirituality, and more real art in these volumes than in whole libraries of so-called New Thought and the neo-Theosophy of the last twenty years. Here is a teacher of the breed of Orpheus and Pythagoras. He has opened two windows into his soul and if I cannot hear the truth through his writing and his music it is because I cannot trust my own ears. “He that hath ears let him hear.” Nor have I needed to go out into the wilderness to hear him. He has come to my door, and the great ones of the world have heralded his approach. These volumes are at once a revelation and an education. He is unprepared for the next twenty-five years who has not read Grierson. One mark he bears which even the profane have saluted. Grierson writes with perfect style. One must go back to “The Occult World,” and the letters from the Master there for such sovereignty of prose expression. It is the garment of truth, strength, simplicity, clarity, and bears its own credentials. “Let me tell you,” writes Maeterlinck, “what joy it has been to me to encounter in your work a soul so strangely fraternal, perhaps I ought to say the most truly fraternal that I have yet found.” And it is this recognition of the brotherly soul that with all its dignity, its power, its wisdom, enables one with grateful humility to draw near and learn in peace.

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Long before Francis Grierson published a line, Francis Shepard was celebrated throughout the world as the greatest musical prodigy since Chopin. Auber, the composer, and Director of the Conservatoire of Music, heard him play, and was fascinated by the fact that his music was intuitional. He knows nothing of written music, of the rules of harmony, nor does he play be ear. He sits down at the piano and the power of Orpheus comes upon him. It is in its ability to exalt, to uplift, to bring to germination the hidden seeds of life, that this music, of which he always speaks impersonally, displays its magic. Sully Prudhomme, a materialist, hearing him play, said “You have placed me upon the threshold of the other world,” and the great Academician was a believer henceforth. Dr. Newborough heard him play in 1880 and the miraculous refrains evoked a new consciousness in him through which he produced that weird book, “Oahspe”. Ten years earlier, when he was in London, when Mrs. Guppy was a prominent medium, it was he whose influence on Florrie Cook was the means by which she became the instrument of those singular and unrivalled manifestations in Prof. (Sir William) Crookes’ house, when, “Katie King,” the daughter, as she said, of Sir Henry Morgan, the Buccaneer, appeared during six weeks, then vanished. And poets, artists, writers, musicians and others innumerable, have testified to the effect upon them of his marvellous music, of which it is said it possesses every quality, except sensuousness. There is a high pure note in all Grierson’s work that bespeaks consecration. I had the honour to be allowed to see an intimate photograph, out of the distant years, of the wondrously handsome young Grierson, and the beautiful Russian Countess to whom he was to be married, and it enabled me to understand the purity of the art that is consecrated by death. It was before this that I heard him play one afternoon at the Arts and Letters Club. There were only three of us to listen. A few strange chords were struck and they touched the depths of divine despair. And then I seemed to be lifted up. The improvisation was like one of those wonderful Chopin things–one of the Scherzos–dreamy, soft, lovely, then melodious, and rippling, passing into a strong and insistent mood, a clamourous note repeated and repeated, swelling into an imperative chord, modulated into a massive volume of harmony, which suddenly broke into fountains of flashing, scintillating song, soaring into the highest octaves, falling away in a glorious current of left hand music, restrained at first, then dashing into torrents and cascades of wonderful sound, with strangely resourceful pedalling, while all the time the exquisite themes of the treble clef shone through the organ-toned volumes of the bass. It was like coming down from Olympus, when he closed. I breathed common air again.

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This “mysterious and enigmatic figure,” as an American writer describes him, is staying in Toronto for the summer. He is writing and holding classes, and he is to give an address in Foresters’ Hall on the 31st on “Wonder,” specially prepared for the occasion. He is sought by the universities elsewhere, and “The Keltic Temperament” has been adopted in Japan as an English text-book. No man of any note in the last fifty years has failed to lay his tribute at Grierson’s feet. Grierson is an Anglican, but Pope Pius X sent him his autographed photograph in mindfulness of Grierson’s prophecy of his election. Kings and Queens have sought his company. Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, Chesterton, Bernard Shaw, Orage and all modern London marvelled over the transcendent essayist who contributed steadily to “The New Age” and had as many as four essays in an issue, signed by as many different pennames. Surely Toronto will hearken. Can I sum up his message. Here are a few of his sentences: “Genius is affirmation. Before we affirm let us be certain our affirmation be not founded on illusion. To spend one’s time affirming the impossible leads to mental decadence. The soul is an eternal reality. Eternity is the everlasting now.” A portrait of Mr. Grierson will be found in the Illustrated Section.

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