Why does not some pianist give us a really popular recital programme?
Frezzample:
Moonlight Sonata.
The Harmonious Blacksmith.
Mendelssohn's Spring Song.
Old Favorites:
Recollections of Home.
Silvery Waves.
Monastery Bells.
Etincelles.
Waves of the Ocean.
Gottschalk's Last Hope.
Clayton's Grand March.
The Battle of Prague.
The Awakening of the Lion.
* * *
There is an encouraging growth of musical understanding and appreciation
in this country. Even now you hear very many people say, "I liked the
scherzo."
* * *
"He sat down in a vacant chair," relates a magazine fictionist. It is,
everything considered, the safest way. Much of the discord in the world
has been caused by gentlemen--and ladies as well--who sat down in chairs
already occupied.
* * *
A Kenwood pastor has resigned because some members of his flock thought
him too broad. The others, we venture, thought him too long.
* * *
"Prof. Hobbs Will Make Globe Trot"--Michigan Daily.
Giddap, old top!
Vacation Travels.
It is a great pleasure to be free, for a time, from the practice of
expressing opinion; free to read the newspapers with no thought of
commenting on the contents; free to glance at a few hectic headlines,
and then bite into a book that you have meant to get to for a long time
past, to read it slowly, without skipping, to read over an especially
well done page and to put the book aside and meditate on the moral which
it pointed, or left you to point. Unless obliged to, why should anybody
write when he can read instead? One's own opinions (hastily formed and
lacking even the graces of expression) are of small account; certainly
they are of less account than Mr. Mill's observations on Liberty, which
I have put down in order to pen a few longish paragraphs. (I would
rather be reading, you understand; my pen is running for the same reason
some street cars run--to hold the franchise.) And speaking of Mill, do
you remember the library catalogue which contained the consecutive
items, "Mill on Liberty" and "Ditto on the Floss"?
* * *
One can get through a good many books on a long railway journey. My
slender stock was exhausted before I reached Colorado, and I am
compelled to re-read until such time as I can lay in a fresh supply. At
home it is difficult to find time to read--that is, considerable
stretches of time, so that one may really digest the pages which he is
leisurely taking in. Fifty years ago there were not many more books
worth reading than there are to-day, but there was more time to
assimilate them. A comparatively few books thoroughly assimilated gave
us Lincoln's Gettysburg address. Not long ago my friend the Librarian
was speaking of this short classic. "Did you ever," said he, "read
Edward Everett's address at Gettysburg?" "No," said I, "and I fear I
shall never get to it." "It is stowed away among his collected
orations," said he. "Not half bad. Unfortunately for its fame, Mr.
Lincoln happened along with a few well chosen remarks which the world
has preferred to remember."
* * *
Another advantage of a long railway journey is the opportunity it
affords to give one's vocal cords a (usually) well-merited rest. It is
possible to travel across the continent without saying a word. A nod or
a shake of the head suffices in your dealings with the porter; and you
learn nothing from questioning him, as he has not been on that run
before. Also, business with the train and Pullman conductors may be
transacted in silence, and there is no profit in asking the latter to
exchange your upper berth for a lower, as he has already been entreated
by all the other occupants of uppers. When the train halts you do not
have to ask, "What place is this?"--you may find out by looking at the
large sign on the station. Nor is it necessary to inquire, "Are we on
time?"--your watch and time-table will enlighten you. You do not have to
exclaim, when a fresh locomotive is violently attached, "Well, I see we
got an engine"--there is always somebody to say it for you. And you
write your orders in the dining car. There is, of course, the chance of
being accosted in the club car, but since this went dry the danger has
been slight. And conversation can always be averted by absorption in a
book, or, in a crisis, by pretending to be dumb.
* * *
Not everybody can travel three or four days without exchanging words
with a fellow traveler. Mr. George Moore, for example, would be quite
wretched. Conversation is the breath of his being, he says somewhere. I
understand that Mr. Moore has another book on press, entitled "Avowals."
Avowals! My dear!... After the "Confessions" and the "Memoirs" what in
the world is there left for the man to avow?
* * *
What a delightful fictionist is Moore! And never more delightful than
when he is writing fiction under the appearance of fact. No one has
taken more to heart the axiom that the imaginary is the only real. As my
friend the Librarian observed, the difference between George Moore and
Baron Munchausen is that Moore's lies are interesting.
* * *
Travelers must carry their own reading matter under government
ownership. The club car library now consists of time-tables, maps, and
pamphlets setting forth the never to be forgotten attractions of the
show places along the way. These are all written by the celebrated prose
poet Ibid, and, with a bottle of pseudo beer or lemon pop, help to make
the club car as gay a place as a mortician's parlor on a rainy
afternoon.
* * *
The treeless plateau over which the train rolls, hour after hour, is the
result of a great uplift. It was not sudden; it was slow but sure. This
result is arid and plateautudinous, in a manner of speaking--not the
best manner. It makes me think of democracy--and prohibition. To this
complexion we shall come at last. To be sure, the genius of man will
continue to cut channels in the monotonous plain; erosion will relieve
the dreary prospect with form and color, but it bids fair to be, for the
most part, a flat and dry world, from which many of us will part with a
minimum of regret. There will remain the inextinguishable desire to
learn what wonders science will disclose. Perhaps--who knows?--they will
discover how to ventilate a sleeping car.
* * *
At Albuquerque I remarked a line of Mexicans basking in the sun (having,
perhaps, finished jumping on their mothers). They looked happy--as happy
as the Russian peasants used to be. Men who know Russia tell me that the
peasants really were happy, even under the twin despotisms of Vodka and
Czar. It was not, of course, a reformer's idea of happiness: a
reformer's idea of happiness is perpetual attention to everybody's
business but his own. People who are interested academically in other
people's happiness usually succeed in making everybody unhappy. Now, the
Russian's happiness was a poor thing, but his own. In reality he was
wretched and oppressed, and his voice and bearing should have expressed
his misery and hopelessness, instead of a foolish content and a silly
detachment from political affairs. But he is at last emancipated, and,
as was said of Mary's fleecy companion, now contemplate the condemned
thing!
* * *
Liberty, equality, international amity, democracy, the kingdom of heaven
on earth--All that is very well, yet Candide remarked to Dr. Pangloss
when all was said and done, "Let us cultivate our garden."
* * *
There are so many interesting things along the way that I should, I
suppose, be filling a notebook. But why mar the pleasure of a journey by
taking notes? as the good Sylvestre Bonnard inquired. Lovers who truly
love do not keep a diary of their happiness.
* * *
In Phoenix, Arizona, distance lends enchantment to the view. But the
hills are far away, and as I did not visit the Southwest to contemplate
the works of man, however ingenious, I followed the westering sun to
where the mountains come down to the sea. I do not fancy the elevated
parts of New Mexico and Arizona; and as there was no thought of pleasing
me when they were created, I feel free to express a modified rapture in
their contemplation. I should have remembered enough geology to know
that granite is not found in this section, except at the bottom of the
Grand Canyon. The hills I like are made of old-fashioned stuff, not
young upstart tufa and sandstone that was not thought of when the
Laurentians were built. One really cannot have much respect for a rock
that he can kick to pieces. The gay young buttes in this land of quickly
shifting horizons are not without their charm; they look well in
certain lights, and they are decidedly better than no hills at all.
Although immature, they have an air of pretending to be very ancient, to
be the ruins of mountains. They are picturesque and colorful. And I
would swap a league of them for one archaic boulder the size of a
box-car, with a thick coverlet of reindeer moss.
* * *
When I left the train at Pasadena I saw what I took to be a procession
of the K. K. K. It proved to be citizens in flu masks. I was interested,
but not alarmed; whereas a lady tourist who debarked on the following
day fell in a swoon and was conveyed to the hospital. The newspapers
charged her disorder to the masks, but as she was from Chicago I suspect
that her reason was unsettled by the sudden revealment of a clean city.
And Pasadena is clean--almost immaculate. I was obliged to join the
masqueraders, and I found the inconvenience only slight. The mask keeps
the nose warm after sundown, and is convenient to sneeze into. And I
have never remarked better looking folks than the people of Pasadena.
The so-called human race has never appeared to better advantage. The
women were especially charming, and were all, for once, equally
handicapped, like the veiled sex in the Orient.
* * *
Whoever christened it the Pacific ocean was the giver of innocent
pleasure to every third person who has set eyes on it since. "There's
the Pacific!" you hear people exclaim to one another when the train
reaches the top of a pass. "Isn't it calm! That's why it is called the
Pacific. And it is pacific, isn't it?" Some such observation must have
escaped the stout adventurer in Darien, before he fell silent upon his
peak.
* * *
I shall say nothing about the never to be sufficiently esteemed climate
of California, nor even allude to the windjammers of Loz Onglaze. The
last word concerning those enthusiasts was spoken by a San Francisco man
who, addressing the people of "Los," explained how the city might
overcome the slight handicap imposed by its distance from the sea. "Lay
an iron pipe to tidewater," he advised; "and then, if you can suck as
hard as you can blow, you will presently have the ocean at your doors."
It would be difficult to improve on that criticism. And so, instead of
praising the climate, I will gladly testify that it is easier to live in
this part of the country than anywhere east of the Sierras. And San
Diego impresses me as the easiest place in the state to live, the year
round.
* * *
The mechanical effort of existence is reduced to its minimum in La
Jolla, a suburb of San Diego, where I am opposing a holiday indolence to
pen these desultory lines. "There's lots of good fish in the sea" that
beats against this rockbound but not stern coast, and there is a fish
market in the village. But each day I see the sign in the window, "No
fish." The fisherman, I am told, is "very independent," a euphemism for
tired, perhaps. He casts his hooks and nets only when the spirit moves
him, and is not impelled to the sea by sordid motives. A true fisherman,
I thought, though he never change his window sign.
* * *
To-day's newspapers contain the protest of the governor of Lower
California against the proposed annexing of his territory by the United
States, Senor Cantu may be a hairless dog in the manger; he may, as he
claims, represent the seething patriotism of all but a negligible
percentage of the population; but he is no doubt correct in merely
asserting that the peninsula will not be annexed. Incidentally, he is on
sure ground when he attributes the chaos in Mexican affairs to
"conflicting political criteria." It is all of that. So far as I have
casually discovered, there is no active annexation sentiment on this
side of the border, for there is no hope of overcoming that provision in
the Mexican constitution which makes it a matter of high treason to
encourage a movement for the diminution of Mexican territory.
* * *
Gov. Cantu's phrase, "conflicting political criteria," applies rather
happily to the doings in Paris these days. The Peace conference and
prohibition in the United States are perhaps the two most prominent
topics before the public, and they are the two things which I have not
heard mentioned since I began my travels.