the sort that car inspectors thrust under Pullman cars when a train
pulls in at night. In the guttering glare was the preacher, and for
a while we could see no one else. He was an immensely tall and thin
mountaineer in blue jeans, his collarless shirt open at the neck and
his hair a tousled mop. As he preached he paced up and down under the
smoking flambeaux, and at each turn he thrust his arms into the air and
yelled “Glory to God!” We crept nearer in the shadow of the cornfield,
and began to hear more of his discourse. He was preaching on the Day
of Judgment. The high kings of the earth, he roared, would all fall
down and die; only the sanctified would stand up to receive the Lord
God of Hosts. One of these kings he mentioned by name, the king of what
he called Greece-y. The king of Greece-y, he said, was doomed to hell.
We crawled forward a few more yards and began to see the audience. It
was seated on benches ranged round the preacher in a circle. Behind him
sat a row of elders, men and women. In front were the younger folk. We
crept on cautiously, and individuals rose out of the ghostly gloom. A
young mother sat suckling her baby, rocking as the preacher paced up
and down. Two scared little girls hugged each other, their pigtails
down their backs. An immensely huge mountain woman, in a gingham dress,
cut in one piece, rolled on her heels at every “Glory to God!” To one
side, and but half visible, was what appeared to be a bed. We found
afterward that half a dozen babies were asleep upon it.
The preacher stopped at last, and there arose out of the darkness a
woman with her hair pulled back into a little tight knot. She began so
quietly that we couldn’t hear what she said, but soon her voice rose
resonantly and we could follow her. She was denouncing the reading
of books. Some wandering book agent, it appeared, had come to her
cabin and tried to sell her a specimen of his wares. She refused
to touch it. Why, indeed, read a book? If what was in it was true,
then everything in it was already in the Bible. If it was false, then
reading it would imperil the soul. This syllogism from Caliph Omar
complete, she sat down. There followed a hymn, led by a somewhat fat
brother wearing silver-rimmed country spectacles. It droned on for
half a dozen stanzas, and then the first speaker resumed the floor.
He argued that the gift of tongues was real and that education was
a snare. Once his children could read the Bible, he said, they had
enough. Beyond lay only infidelity and damnation. Sin stalked the
cities. Dayton itself was a Sodom. Even Morgantown had begun to forget
God. He sat down, and a female aurochs in gingham got up. She began
quietly, but was soon leaping and roaring, and it was hard to follow
her. Under cover of the turmoil we sneaked a bit closer.
A couple of other discourses followed, and there were two or three
hymns. Suddenly a change of mood began to make itself felt. The
last hymn ran longer than the others, and dropped gradually into
a monotonous, unintelligible chant. The leader beat time with his
book. The faithful broke out with exultations. When the singing ended
there was a brief palaver that we could not hear, and two of the men
moved a bench into the circle of light directly under the flambeaux.
Then a half-grown girl emerged from the darkness and threw herself
upon it. We noticed with astonishment that she had bobbed hair.
“This sister,” said the leader, “has asked for prayers.” We moved
a bit closer. We could now see faces plainly, and hear every word.
What followed quickly reached such heights of barbaric grotesquerie
that it was hard to believe it real. At a signal all the faithful
crowded up to the bench and began to pray--not in unison, but each
for himself! At another they all fell on their knees, their arms over
the penitent. The leader kneeled facing us, his head alternately
thrown back dramatically or buried in his hands. Words spouted from
his lips like bullets from a machine-gun--appeals to God to pull the
penitent back out of hell, defiances of the demons of the air, a vast
impassioned jargon of apocalyptic texts. Suddenly he rose to his feet,
threw back his head and began to speak in the tongues--blub-blub-blub,
gurgle-gurgle-gurgle. His voice rose to a higher register. The climax
was a shrill, inarticulate squawk, like that of a man throttled. He
fell headlong across the pyramid of supplicants.
A comic scene? Somehow, no. The poor half-wits were too horribly in
earnest. It was like peeping through a knothole at the writhings of
people in pain. From the squirming and jabbering mass a young woman
gradually detached herself--a woman not uncomely, with a pathetic
homemade cap on her head. Her head jerked back, the veins of her neck
swelled, and her fists went to her throat as if she were fighting for
breath. She bent backward until she was like half a hoop. Then she
suddenly snapped forward. We caught a flash of the whites of her eyes.
Presently her whole body began to be convulsed--great throes that
began at the shoulders and ended at the hips. She would leap to her
feet, thrust her arms in air, and then hurl herself upon the heap. Her
praying flattened out into a mere delirious caterwauling, like that of
a Tom cat on a petting party. I describe the thing discreetly, and as a
strict behaviorist. The lady’s subjective sensations I leave to infidel
pathologists, privy to the works of Ellis, Freud and Moll. Whatever
they were, they were obviously not painful, for they were accompanied
by vast heavings and gurglings of a joyful and even ecstatic nature.
And they seemed to be contagious, too, for soon a second penitent, also
female, joined the first, and then came a third, and a fourth, and a
fifth. The last one had an extraordinary violent attack. She began
with mild enough jerks of the head, but in a moment she was bounding
all over the place, like a chicken with its head cut off. Every time
her head came up a stream of hosannas would issue out of it. Once she
collided with a dark, undersized brother, hitherto silent and stolid.
Contact with her set him off as if he had been kicked by a mule. He
leaped into the air, threw back his head, and began to gargle as if
with a mouthful of BB shot. Then he loosed one tremendous, stentorian
sentence in the tongues, and collapsed.
By this time the performers were quite oblivious to the profane
universe and so it was safe to go still closer. We left our hiding
and came up to the little circle of light. We slipped into the vacant
seats on one of the rickety benches. The heap of mourners was directly
before us. They bounced into us as they cavorted. The smell that they
radiated, sweating there in that obscene heap, half suffocated us. Not
all of them, of course, did the thing in the grand manner. Some merely
moaned and rolled their eyes. The female ox in gingham flung her great
bulk on the ground and jabbered an unintelligible prayer. One of the
men, in the intervals between fits, put on his spectacles and read his
Bible. Beside me on the bench sat the young mother and her baby. She
suckled it through the whole orgy, obviously fascinated by what was
going on, but never venturing to take any hand in it. On the bed just
outside the light half a dozen other babies slept peacefully. In the
shadows, suddenly appearing and as suddenly going away, were vague
figures, whether of believers or of scoffers I do not know. They seemed
to come and go in couples. Now and then a couple at the ringside would
step out and vanish into the black night. After a while some came
back, the males looking somewhat sheepish. There was whispering outside
the circle of vision. A couple of Fords lurched up the road, cutting
holes in the darkness with their lights. Once someone out of sight
loosed a bray of laughter.
All this went on for an hour or so. The original penitent, by this
time, was buried three deep beneath the heap. One caught a glimpse,
now and then, of her yellow bobbed hair, but then she would vanish
again. How she breathed down there I don’t know; it was hard enough
six feet away, with a strong five-cent cigar to help. When the praying
brothers would rise up for a bout with the tongues their faces were
streaming with perspiration. The fat harridan in gingham sweated like
a longshoreman. Her hair got loose and fell down over her face. She
fanned herself with her skirt. A powerful old gal she was, plainly
equal in her day to a bout with obstetrics and a week’s washing on the
same morning, but this was worse than a week’s washing. Finally, she
fell into a heap, breathing in great, convulsive gasps.
Finally, we got tired of the show and returned to Dayton. It was nearly
eleven o’clock--an immensely late hour for those latitudes--but the
whole town was still gathered in the courthouse yard, listening to the
disputes of theologians. The Scopes trial had brought them in from
all directions. There was a friar wearing a sandwich sign announcing
that he was the Bible champion of the world. There was a Seventh Day
Adventist arguing that Clarence Darrow was the beast with seven heads
and ten horns described in Revelation xiii, and that the end of the
world was at hand. There was an evangelist made up like Andy Gump,
with the news that atheists in Cincinnati were preparing to descend
upon Dayton, hang the eminent Judge Raulston, and burn the town. There
was an ancient who maintained that no Catholic could be a Christian.
There was the eloquent Dr. T. T. Martin, of Blue Mountain, Miss., come
to town with a truck-load of torches and hymn-books to put Darwin in
his place. There was a singing brother bellowing apocalyptic hymns.
There was William Jennings Bryan, followed everywhere by a gaping
crowd. Dayton was having a roaring time. It was better than the circus.
But the note of devotion was simply not there; the Daytonians, after
listening a while, would slip away to Robinson’s drug-store to regale
themselves with coca-cola, or to the lobby of the Aqua Hotel, where the
learned Raulston sat in state, judicially picking his teeth. The real
religion was not present. It began at the bridge over the town creek,
where the road makes off for the hills.
V. BEETHOVEN
Beethoven was one of those lucky men whose stature, viewed in
retrospect, grows steadily. How many movements have there been to
put him on the shelf? At least a dozen in the hundred years since
his death. There was one only a few years ago in New York, launched
by idiot critics and supported by the war fever: his place, it
appeared, was to be taken by such prophets of the new enlightenment as
Stravinsky! The net result of that movement was simply that the best
orchestra in America went to pot--and Beethoven survived unscathed. It
is, indeed, almost impossible to imagine displacing him--at all events,
in the concert-hall, where the challenge of Bach cannot reach him.
Surely the Nineteenth Century was not deficient in master musicians. It
produced Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Wagner and Brahms, to say nothing
of a whole horde of Dvořáks, Tschaikowskys, Debussys, Raffs, Verdis and
Puccinis. Yet it gave us nothing better than the first movement of the
Eroica. That movement, the first challenge of the new music, remains
its last word. It is the noblest piece of absolute music ever written
in the sonata form, and it is the noblest piece of program music.
In Beethoven, indeed, the distinction between the two became purely
imaginary. Everything he wrote was, in a way, program music, including
even the first two symphonies, and everything was absolute music,
including even the Battle grotesquerie. (Is the latter, indeed, as bad
as ancient report makes it? Why doesn’t some _Kappellmeister_ let us
hear it?)
It was a bizarre jest of the gods to pit Beethoven, in his first
days in Vienna, against Papa Haydn. Haydn was undeniably a genius of
the first water, and, after Mozart’s death, had no apparent reason
to fear a rival. If he did not actually create the symphony as we
know it to-day, then he at least enriched the form with its first
genuine masterpieces--and not with a scant few, but literally with
dozens. Tunes of the utmost loveliness gushed from him like oil from
a well. More, he knew how to manage them; he was a master of musical
architectonics. If his music is sniffed at to-day, then it is only by
fools; there are at least six of his symphonies that are each worth
all the cacophony hatched by a whole herd of Schönbergs and Eric
Saties, with a couple of Korngolds thrown in to flavor the pot. But
when Beethoven stepped in, then poor old Papa had to step down. It was
like pitting a gazelle against an aurochs. One colossal bellow, and the
combat was over. Musicians are apt to look at it as a mere contest
of technicians. They point to the vastly greater skill and ingenuity
of Beethoven--his firmer grip upon his materials, his greater daring
and resourcefulness, his far better understanding of dynamics, rhythms
and clang-tints--in brief, his tremendously superior musicianship. But
that was not what made him so much greater than Haydn--for Haydn, too,
had his superiorities; for example, his far readier inventiveness, his
capacity for making better tunes. What lifted Beethoven above the old
master, and above all other men of music save perhaps Bach and Brahms,
was simply his greater dignity as a man. The feelings that Haydn put
into tone were the feelings of a country pastor, a rather civilized
stockbroker, a viola player gently mellowed by Kulmbacher. When he wept
it was with the tears of a woman who has discovered another wrinkle;
when he rejoiced it was with the joy of a child on Christmas morning.
But the feelings that Beethoven put into his music were the feelings of
a god. There was something olympian in his snarls and rages, and there
was a touch of hell-fire in his mirth.
It is almost a literal fact that there is not a trace of cheapness in
the whole body of his music. He is never sweet and romantic; he never
sheds conventional tears; he never strikes orthodox attitudes. In his
lightest moods there is the immense and inescapable dignity of the
ancient Hebrew prophets. He concerns himself, not with the puerile
agonies of love, but with the eternal tragedy of man. He is a great
tragic poet, and like all great tragic poets, he is obsessed by a sense
of the inscrutable meaninglessness of life. From the Eroica onward he
seldom departs from that theme. It roars through the first movement
of the C minor, and it comes to a stupendous final statement in the
Ninth. All this, in his day, was new in music, and so it caused murmurs
of surprise and even indignation. The step from Mozart’s Jupiter to
the first movement of the Eroica was uncomfortable; the Viennese began
to wriggle in their stalls. But there was one among them who didn’t
wriggle, and that was Franz Schubert. Turn to the first movement of his
Unfinished or to the slow movement of his Tragic, and you will see how
quickly the example of Beethoven was followed--and with what genius!
But there was a long hiatus after that, with Mendelssohn, Weber,
Chopin and company performing upon their pretty pipes. Eventually the
day of November 6, 1876, dawned in Karlsruhe, and with it came the
first performance of Brahms’ C minor. Once more the gods walked in the
concert-hall. They will walk again when another Brahms is born, but
not before. For nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the
man. What ails the music of all the Tschaikowskys, Stravinskys--and
Strausses? What ails it is that it is the music of shallow men. It is
often, in its way, lovely. It bristles with charming musical ideas.
It is infinitely ingenious and workmanlike. But it is as hollow, at
bottom, as a bull by Bishop Manning. It is the music of second-rate men.
Beethoven disdained all their artifices: he didn’t need them. It would
be hard to think of a composer, even of the fourth rate, who worked
with thematic material of less intrinsic merit. He borrowed tunes
wherever he found them; he made them up out of snatches of country
jigs; when he lacked one altogether he contented himself with a simple
phrase, a few banal notes. All such things he viewed simply as raw
materials; his interest was concentrated upon their use. To that use
of them he brought the appalling powers of his unrivaled genius. His
ingenuity began where that of other men left off. His most complicated
structures retained the overwhelming clarity of the Parthenon. And into
them he got a kind of feeling that even the Greeks could seldom match;
he was preëminently a modern man, with all trace of the barbarian
vanished. In his gorgeous music there went all of the high skepticism
that was of the essence of the Eighteenth Century, but into it there
also went the new enthusiasm, the new determination to challenge and
beat the gods, that dawned with the Nineteenth.
The older I grow, the more I am convinced that the most portentous
phenomenon in the whole history of music was the first public
performance of the Eroica on April 7, 1805. The manufacturers of
program notes have swathed that gigantic work in so many layers of
childish legend and speculation that its intrinsic merits have been
almost forgotten. Was it dedicated to Napoleon I? If so, was the
dedication sincere or ironical? Who cares--that is, who with ears? It
might have been dedicated, just as well, to Louis XIV, Paracelsus or
Pontius Pilate. What makes it worth discussing, to-day and forever,
is the fact that on its very first page Beethoven threw his hat into
the ring and laid his claim to immortality. Bang!--and he is off!
No compromise! No easy bridge from the past! The Second Symphony is
already miles behind. A new order of music has been born. The very
manner of it is full of challenge. There is no sneaking into the
foul business by way of a mellifluous and disarming introduction; no
preparatory hemming and hawing to cajole the audience and enable the
conductor to find his place in the score. Nay! Out of silence comes
the angry crash of the tonic triad, and then at once, with no pause,
the first statement of the first subject--grim, domineering, harsh,
raucous, and yet curiously lovely--with its astounding collision with
that electrical C sharp. The carnage has begun early; we are only
in the seventh measure! In the thirteenth and fourteenth comes the
incomparable roll down the simple scale of E flat--and what follows
is all that has ever been said, perhaps all that ever _will_ be said,
about music-making in the grand manner. What was afterward done, even
by Beethoven, was done in the light of that perfect example. Every line
of modern music that is honestly music bears some sort of relation to
that epoch-making first movement.
The rest is Beethovenish, but not quintessence. There is a legend that
the funeral march was put in simply because it was a time of wholesale
butchery, and funeral marches were in fashion. No doubt the first-night
audience in Vienna, shocked and addled by the piled-up defiances of
the first movement, found the lugubrious strains grateful. But the
_scherzo_? Another felonious assault upon poor Papa Haydn! Two giants
boxing clumsily, to a crazy piping by an orchestra of dwarfs. No
wonder some honest Viennese in the gallery yelled: “I’d give another
kreutzer if the thing would stop!” Well, it stopped finally, and then
came something reassuring--a theme with variations. Everyone in Vienna
knew and esteemed Beethoven’s themes with variations. He was, in fact,
the rising master of themes with variations in the town. But a joker
remained in the pack. The variations grew more and more complex and
surprising. Strange novelties got into them. The polite exercises
became tempestuous, moody, cacophonous, tragic. At the end a harsh,
hammering, exigent row of chords--the C minor Symphony casting its
sinister shadow before!
It must have been a great night in Vienna. But perhaps not for the
actual Viennese. They went to hear “a new grand symphony in D sharp”
(_sic!_). What they found in the Theater-an-der-Wien was a revolution!
VI. RONDO ON AN ANCIENT THEME
It is the economic emancipation of woman, I suppose, that must be
blamed for the present wholesale discussion of the sex question,
so offensive to the romantic. Eminent authorities have full often
described, and with the utmost heat and eloquence, her state before
she was delivered from her fetters and turned loose to root or die.
Almost her only feasible trade, in those dark days, was that of wife.
True enough, she might also become a servant girl, or go to work in a
factory, or offer herself upon the streets, but all of those vocations
were so revolting that no rational woman followed them if she could
help it: she would leave any one of them at a moment’s notice at
the call of a man, for the call of a man meant promotion for her,
economically and socially. The males of the time, knowing what a boon
they had to proffer, drove hard bargains. They demanded a long list of
high qualities in the woman they summoned to their seraglios, but most
of all they demanded what they called virtue. It was not sufficient
that a candidate should be anatomically undefiled; she must also be
pure in mind. There was, of course, but one way to keep her so pure,
and that was by building a high wall around her mind, and hitting
her with a club every time she ventured to peer over it. It was as
dangerous, in that Christian era, for a woman to show any interest in
or knowledge of the great physiological farce of sex as it would be
to-day for a presidential candidate to reveal himself in his cups on
the hustings. Everyone knew, to be sure, that as a mammal she had sex,
and that as a potential wife and mother she probably had some secret
interest in its phenomena, but it was felt, perhaps wisely, that even
the most academic theorizing had within it the deadly germs of the
experimental method, and so she was forbidden to think about the matter
at all, and whatever information she acquired at all she had to acquire
by a method of bootlegging.
The generation still on its legs has seen the almost total collapse
of that naïve and constabulary system, and of the economic structure
supporting it. Beginning with the eighties of the last century, there
rose up a harem rebellion which quickly knocked both to pieces. Two
women of the Western World not only began to plunge heroically into
all of the old professions, hitherto sacred to men; they also began to
invent a lot of new professions, many of them unimagined by men. Worse,
they began to succeed in them. The working woman of the old days worked
only until she could snare a man; any man was better than her work.
But the working woman of the new days was under no such pressure; her
work made her a living and sometimes more than a living; when a man
appeared in her net she took two looks at him, one of them usually very
searching, before landing him. The result was an enormous augmentation
of her feeling of self-sufficiency, her spirit of independence,
her natural inclination to get two sides into the bargaining. The
result, secondarily, was a revolt against all the old taboos that had
surrounded her, all the childish incapacities and ignorances that had
been forced upon her. The result, tertiarily, was a vast running amok
in the field that, above all others, had been forbidden to her: that of
sexual knowledge and experiment.
We now suffer from the effects of that running amok. It is women, not
men, who are doing all the current gabbling about sex, and proposing
all the new-fangled modifications of the rules and regulations
ordained by God, and they are hard at it very largely, I suppose,
because being at it at all is a privilege that is still new to them.
The whole order of human females, in other words, is passing through
a sort of intellectual adolescence, and it is disturbed as greatly
as biological adolescents are by the spouting of the hormones. The
attitude of men toward the sex question, it seems to me, has not
changed greatly in my time. Barring a few earnest men whose mental
processes, here as elsewhere, are essentially womanish, they still view
it somewhat jocosely. Taking one with another, they believe that they
know all about it that is worth knowing, and so it does not challenge
their curiosity, and they do not put in much time discussing it, save
mockingly. But among the women, if a bachelor may presume to judge,
interest in it is intense. They want to know all that is known about
it, all that has been guessed and theorized about it; they bristle with
ideas of their own about it. It is hard to find a reflective woman,
in these days, who is not harboring some new and startling scheme for
curing the evils of monogamous marriage; it is impossible to find any
woman who has not given ear to such schemes. Women, not men, read the
endless books upon the subject that now rise mountain-high in all the
book-stores, and women, not men, discuss and rediscuss the notions in
them. An acquaintance of mine, a distinguished critic, owns a copy of
one of the most revolutionary of these books, by title “The Art of
Love,” that was suppressed on the day of its publication by the alert
Comstocks. He tells me that he has already lent it to twenty-six women
and that he has more than fifty applications for it on file. Yet he has
never read it himself!