Pastor People’s Church, Minneapolis, Minn.
Paris is the paradise of pleasure. Cafés and cabarets invite on every
hand. One night at Montmartre I went to “Le Cabaret du Neant.” As I
entered, a green lantern overhead flung its deadly pallor on me. Two
waiters dressed like undertakers met me and ushered me into a room where
the walls were draped in black, the tables were coffins, and the cups
were skulls. Like the mummies at Egyptian feasts which reminded the
revelers of death, I saw a skeleton in the corner of the room, and the
chandelier over my head was festooned with bones. Funeral tapers served
as lights on the coffin-lid table, and to dead march music pictures on
the wall were transformed from life into sickness, decay and fleshless
bones.
Here death was ridiculed, but I thought this micawberesque surrounding
and setting was but an analogy of much cabaret, roof garden and café life
in America.
Late hours lure. The cup of foaming pleasure is mixed with tears of pain.
Excitement and absence of restraint drain vitality so that carousers
are unfit for life’s practical duties of business, home, society and
religion. Midnight dissipation breaks down the reserve of virtue and
becomes a vestibule to vice through which throng fevered bodies, stifled
wits and sodden souls. Surely they show, as the mask is removed, faces
that are anything but gay. Sin has pleasures, but they are only “for a
season.” Soon the lights fade, the sweet turns bitter, apples of Sodom
turn to dust and ashes, and we have nothing but grief and pain for
promised joy.
Women rule. Cherubim of hell, they sit around in scanty costumes that
show what they are supposed to hide, and eat and drink, talk and look
and leer with a flushed and overwrought animation of mind and body. De
Musset’s confession is ours, and first astonishment gives way to horror
and pity. The masked ball is but the scum of libertinism; the feast is
ennui trying to live; the palace of sin is filled with yawning mouths,
fixed eyes and hooked hands.
If we believe with the Mohammedan that heaven here and hereafter is
pleasure, and so smile at debauchery and defy death, we will live to
shed tears hotter than blood, dream dreams that reflect the flames of
a literal hell, and have a moral nature as hideous and deformed as our
bodies, so twisted with disease that the undertaker must change the shape
of the coffin to fit the limbs.
_The Seven Ages of Man_
From “As You Like It”
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women in it are merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time may play many parts,
His acts being,—“Seven Ages.”
At first the infant, mewing and puking in the nurse’s arms;
Then the whining schoolboy,
With his satchel and shining morning face,
Creeping like snail, unwillingly to school.
Then the soldier, full of strange oaths
And bearded like a pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble, reputation,
Even in the cannon’s mouth.
Then the lover, sighing like a furnace,
With a woeful ballad made to his mistress’ eyebrow.
And then the justice, in fair round belly,
And good capon lined,
With eyes to see, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances.
And so he plays his part.
The sixth age, slips into the lean and slippers pantalon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose well filled, a world too wide
For his shrunk shanks,
And his big, manly voice, turning again to childish treble,
Pipes and whistles in his sounds.
Last scene of all that ends this strange eventful history
is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans eyes,
sans teeth, sans taste, sans everything.
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