that which comes rich in associations from pleasures of the past is a
doubt that no hedonistic philosopher seems to have solved yet. We
should, in fact, be sorry if any had, for in that case we should be
without such small occasion as we now have to suggest it in the
forefront of a paper which will not finally pass beyond the suggestion.
When the reader has arrived at our last word we can safely promise him
he will still have the misgiving we set out with, and will be confirmed
in it by the reflection that no pleasure, either of the earliest or the
latest experience, can be unmixed with pain. One will be fresher than
the other; that is all; but it is not certain that the surprise will
have less of disappointment in it than the unsurprise. In the one case,
the case of youth, say, there will be the racial disappointment to count
with, and in the other, the case of age, there will be the personal
disappointment, which is probably a lighter thing. The racial
disappointment is expressed in what used to be called, somewhat
untranslatably, _Weltschmerz_. This was peculiarly the appanage of
youth, being the anticipative melancholy, the pensive foreboding,
distilled from the blighted hopes of former generations of youth. Mixed
with the effervescent blood of the young heart, it acted like a subtle
poison, and eventuated in more or less rhythmical deliriums, in cynical
excesses of sentiment, in extravagances of behavior, in effects which
commonly passed when the subject himself became ancestor, and
transmitted his inherited burden of _Weltschmerz_ to his posterity. The
old are sometimes sad, on account of the sins and follies they have
personally committed and know they will commit again, but for pure
gloom--gloom positive, absolute, all but palpable--you must go to youth.
That is not merely the time of disappointment, it is in itself
disappointment; it is not what it expected to be; and it finds nothing
which confronts it quite, if at all, responsive to the inward vision.
The greatest, the loveliest things in the world lose their iridescence
or dwindle before it. The old come to things measurably prepared to see
them as they are, take them for what they are worth; but the young are
the prey of impassioned prepossessions which can never be the true
measures.
* * * * *
The disadvantage of an opening like this is that it holds the same
quality, if not quantity, of disappointment as those other sublime
things, and we earnestly entreat the reader to guard himself against
expecting anything considerable from it. Probably the inexperienced
reader has imagined from our weighty prologue something of signal
importance to follow; but the reader who has been our reader through
thick and thin for many years will have known from the first that we
were not going to deal with anything more vital, say, than a few
emotions and memories, prompted, one night of the other winter, by
hearing one of the old-fashioned Italian operas which a more than
commonly inspired management had been purveying to an over-Wagnered
public. In fact, we had a sense that this sort of reader was there with
us the night we saw "L'Elisir d'Amore," and that it was in his
personality we felt and remembered many things which we could have
fancied personal only to ourselves.
He began to take the affair out of our keeping from the first moment,
when, after passing through the crowd arriving from the snowy street, we
found our way through the distracted vestibule of the opera-house into
the concentred auditorium and hushed ourselves in the presence of the
glowing spectacle of the stage. "Ah, this is the real thing," he
whispered, and he would not let us, at any moment when we could have
done so without molesting our neighbors, censure the introduction of
Alpine architecture in the entourage of an Italian village piazza. "It
is a village at the foot of the Alps probably," he said, "and if not, no
matter. It is as really the thing as all the rest: as the chorus of
peasants and soldiers, of men and women who impartially accompany the
orchestra in the differing sentiments of the occasion; as the rivals who
vie with one another in recitative and aria; as the heroine who holds
them both in a passion of suspense while she weaves the enchantment of
her trills and runs about them; as the whole circumstance of the
divinely impossible thing which defies nature and triumphs over
prostrate probability. What does a little Swiss Gothic matter? The thing
is always opera, and it is always Italy. I was thinking, as we crowded
in there from the outside, with our lives in our hands, through all
those trolleys and autos and carriages and cabs and sidewalk
ticket-brokers, of the first time I saw this piece. It was in Venice,
forty-odd years ago, and I arrived at the theatre in a gondola, slipping
to the water-gate with a waft of the gondolier's oar that was both
impulse and arrest, and I was helped up the sea-weedy, slippery steps
by a beggar whom age and sorrow had bowed to just the right angle for
supporting my hand on the shoulder he lent it. The blackness of the tide
was pierced with the red plunge of a few lamps, and it gurgled and
chuckled as my gondola lurched off and gave way to another; and when I
got to my box--a box was two florins, but I could afford it--I looked
down on just this scene, over a pit full of Austrian officers and
soldiers, and round on a few Venetians darkling in the other boxes and
half-heartedly enjoying the music. It was the most hopeless hour of the
Austrian occupation, and the air was heavy with its oppression and
tobacco, for the officers smoked between the acts. It was only the more
intensely Italian for that; but it was not more Italian than this; and
when I see those impossible people on the stage, and hear them sing, I
breathe an atmosphere that is like the ether beyond the pull of our
planet, and is as far from all its laws and limitations."
* * * * *
Our friend continued to talk pretty well through the whole interval
between the first and second acts; and we were careful not to interrupt
him, for from the literary quality of his diction we fancied him talking
for publication, and we wished to take note of every turn of his phrase.
"It's astonishing," he said, "how little art needs in order to give the
effect of life. A touch here and there is enough; but art is so
conditioned that it has to work against time and space, and is obliged
to fill up and round out its own body with much stuff that gives no
sense of life. The realists," he went on, "were only half right."
"Isn't it better to be half right than wrong altogether?" we
interposed.
"I'm not sure. What I wanted to express is that every now and then I
find in very defective art of all kinds that mere _look_ of the real
thing which suffices. A few words of poetry glance from the prose body
of verse and make us forget the prose. A moment of dramatic motive
carries hours of heavy comic or tragic performance. Is any piece of
sculpture or painting altogether good? Or isn't the spectator held in
the same glamour which involved the artist before he began the work, and
which it is his supreme achievement to impart, so that it shall hide all
defects? When I read what you wrote the other month, or the other year,
about the vaudeville shows--?
"Hush!" we entreated. "Don't bring those low associations into this high
presence."
"Why not? It is all the same thing. There is no inequality in the region
of art; and I have seen things on the vaudeville stage which were graced
with touches of truth so exquisite, so ideally fine, that I might have
believed I was getting them at first hand and pure from the
street-corner. Of course, the poor fellows who had caught them from life
had done their worst to imprison them in false terms, to labor them out
of shape, and build them up in acts where anything less precious would
have been lost; but they survived all that and gladdened the soul. I
realized that I should have been making a mistake if I had required any
'stunt' which embodied them to be altogether composed of touches of
truth, of moments of life. We can stand only a very little radium; the
captured sunshine burns with the fires that heat the summers of the
farthest planets; and we cannot handle the miraculous substance as if it
were mere mineral. A touch of truth is perhaps not only all we need, but
all we can endure in any one example of art."
"You are lucky if you get so much," we said, "even at a vaudeville
show."
"Or at an opera," he returned, and then the curtain rose on the second
act. When it fell again, he resumed, as if he had been interrupted in
the middle of a sentence. "What should you say was the supreme moment of
this thing, or was the radioactive property, the very soul? Of course,
it is there where Nemorino drinks the elixir and finds himself freed
from Adina; when he bursts into the joyous song of liberation and gives
that delightful caper
'Which signifies indifference, indifference,
Which signifies indifference,'
and which not uncommonly results from a philter composed entirely of
claret. When Adina advances in the midst of his indifference and breaks
into the lyrical lament
'Neppur mi guarda!'
she expresses the mystery of the sex which can be best provoked to love
by the sense of loss, and the vital spark of the opera is kindled. The
rest is mere incorporative material. It has to be. In other conditions
the soul may be disembodied, and we may have knowledge of it without the
interposition of anything material; but if there are spiritual bodies as
there are material bodies, still the soul may wrap itself from other
souls and emit itself only in gleams. But putting all that aside, I
should like to bet that the germ, the vital spark of the opera, felt
itself life, felt itself flame, first of all in that exquisite moment of
release which Nemorino's caper conveys. Till then it must have been
rather blind groping, with nothing better in hand than that old,
worn-out notion of a love-philter. What will you bet?"
"We never bet," we virtuously replied. "We are principled against it in
all cases where we feel sure of losing; though in this case we could
never settle it, for both composer and librettist are dead."
"Yes, isn't it sad that spirits so gay should be gone from a world that
needs gayety so much? That is probably the worst of death; it is so
indiscriminate," the reader thoughtfully observed.
"But aren't you," we asked, "getting rather far away from the question
whether the pleasure of experience isn't greater than the pleasure of
inexperience--whether later operas don't give more joy than the first?"
"Was that the question?" he returned. "I thought it was whether Italian
opera was not as much at home in exile as in its native land."
"Well, make it that," we responded, tolerantly.
"Oh no," he met us half-way. "But it naturalizes itself everywhere. They
have it in St. Petersburg and in Irkutsk, for all I know, and certainly
in Calcutta and Australia, the same as in Milan and Venice and Naples,
or as here in New York, where everything is so much at home, or so
little. It's the most universal form of art."
"Is it? Why more so than sculpture or painting or architecture?"
Our demand gave the reader pause. Then he said: "I think it is more
immediately universal than the other forms of art. These all want time
to denationalize themselves. It is their nationality which first
authorizes them to be; but it takes decades, centuries sometimes, for
them to begin their universal life. It seems different with operas.
'Cavalleria Rusticana' was as much at home with us in its first year as
'L'Elisir d'Amore' is now in its sixtieth or seventieth."
"But it isn't," we protested, "denationalized. What can be more
intensely Italian than an Italian opera is anywhere?"
"You're right," the reader owned, as the reader always must, if honest,
in dealing with the writer. "It is the operatic audience, not the opera,
which is denationalized when the opera becomes universal. We are all
Italians here to-night. I only wish we were in our native land,
listening to this musical peal of ghostly laughter from the past."
* * * * *
The reader was silent a moment while the vast house buzzed and murmured
and babbled from floor to roof. Perhaps the general note of the
conversation, if it could have been tested, would have been found
voluntary rather than spontaneous; but the sound was gay, and there
could be no question of the splendor of the sight. We may decry our own
almost as much as we please, but there is a point where we must cease to
depreciate ourselves; even for the sake of evincing our superiority to
our possessions, we must not undervalue some of them. One of these is
the Metropolitan Opera House, where the pride of wealth, the vanity of
fashion, the beauty of youth, and the taste and love of music fill its
mighty cup to the brim in the proportions that they bear to one another
in the community. Wherever else we fail of our ideal, there we surely
realize it on terms peculiarly our own. Subjectively the scene is
intensely responsive to the New York spirit, and objectively it is most
expressive of the American character in that certain surface effect of
thin brilliancy which remains with the spectator the most memorable
expression of its physiognomy.
No doubt something like this was in the reader's mind when he resumed,
with a sigh: "It's rather pathetic how much more magnificently Italian
opera has always been circumstanced in exile than at home. It had to
emigrate in order to better its fortunes; it could soon be better seen
if not heard outside of Italy than in its native country. It was only
where it could be purely conventional as well as ideal that it could
achieve its greatest triumphs. It had to make a hard fight for its
primacy among the amusements that flatter the pride as well as charm the
sense. You remember how the correspondents of Mr. Spectator wrote to him
in scorn of the affected taste of 'the town' when the town in London
first began to forsake the theatre and to go to the opera?"
"Yes, they were very severe on the town for pretending to a pleasure
imparted in a language it could not understand a word of. They had all
the reason on their side, and they needed it; but the opera is
independent of reason, and the town felt that for its own part it could
dispense with reason, too. The town can always do that. It would not go
seriously or constantly to English opera, though ever so much invited to
do so, for all the reasons, especially the patriotic reasons. Isn't it
strange, by-the-way, how English opera is a fashion, while Italian opera
remains a passion? We had it at its best, didn't we, in the Gilbert and
Sullivan operas, which were the most charming things in the world; but
they charmed only for a while, and it may be doubted whether they ever
greatly charmed the town. The manager of the Metropolitan replaces
German with Italian opera, and finds his account in it, but could he
find his account in it if he put on 'The Mikado' instead of 'L'Elisir
d'Amore'? If he did so, the town would not be here. Why?"
The reader did not try to answer at once. He seemed to be thinking, but
perhaps he was not; other readers may judge from his reply, which, when
it came, was this: "There seems to be something eternally as well as
universally pleasing in Italian opera; but what the thing is, or how
much of a thing it is, I wouldn't undertake to say. Possibly the fault
of English opera is its actuality. It seizes upon a contemporaneous mood
or fad, and satirizes it; but the Italian opera at its lightest deals
with a principle of human nature, and it is never satirical; it needn't
be, for it is as independent of the morals as of the reasons. It isn't
obliged, by the terms of its existence, to teach, any more than it is
obliged to convince. It's the most absolute thing in the world; and from
its unnatural height it can stoop at will in moments of enrapturing
naturalness without ever losing poise. Wasn't that delightful where
Caruso hesitated about his encore, and then, with a shrug and a waft of
his left hand to the house, went off in order to come back and give his
aria with more effect? That was a touch of naturalness not in the scheme
of the opera."
"Yes, but it was more racial, more personal, than natural. It was
delicious, but we are not sure we approved of it."
"Ah, in Italian opera you're not asked to approve; you're only desired
to enjoy!"
"Well, then that bit of racial personality was of the effect of
actuality, and it jarred."
"Perhaps you're right," the reader sighed, but he added: "It was
charming; yes, it made itself part of the piece. Nemorino would have
done just as Caruso did."
At the last fall of the curtain the reader and the writer rose in
unison, a drop of that full tide of life which ebbed by many channels
out of the vast auditorium, and in two or three minutes left it dry.
They stayed in their duplex personality to glance at the silken
evanescences from the boxes, and then, being in the mood for the best
society, they joined the shining presences in the vestibule where these
waited for their carriages and automobiles. Of this company the
interlocutors felt themselves so inseparably part that they could with
difficulty externate themselves so far as to observe that it was of the
quality of "the town" which had gone to Italian opera from the first.
In Mr. Spectator's time the town would have been lighted by the smoky
torches of linkboys to its chairs; now it was called to its electric
autos in the blaze of a hundred incandescent bulbs; but the difference
was not enough to break the tradition. There was something in the aspect
of that patrician throng, as it waited the turn of each, which struck
the reader and writer jointly as a novel effect from any American crowd,
but which the writer scarcely dares intimate to the general reader, for
the general reader is much more than generally a woman, and she may not
like it. Perhaps we can keep it from offending by supposing that the
fact can be true only of the most elect socially, but in any case the
fact seemed to be that the men were handsomer than the women. They were
not only handsomer, but they were sweller (if we may use a comparative
hitherto unachieved) in look, and even in dress.
How this could have happened in a civilization so peculiarly devoted as
ours to the evolution of female beauty and style is a question which
must be referred to scientific inquiry. It does not affect the vast
average of woman's loveliness and taste among us in ranks below the
very highest; this remains unquestioned and unquestionable; and perhaps,
in the given instance, it was an appearance and not a fact, or perhaps
the joint spectator was deceived as to the supreme social value of those
rapidly dwindling and dissolving groups.
The reader and the writer were some time in finding their true level,
when they issued into the common life of the street, and they walked
home as much like driving home as they could. On the way the reader, who
was so remotely lost in thought that the writer could scarcely find him,
made himself heard in a musing suspiration: "There was something
missing. Can you think what it was?"
"Yes, certainly; there was no ballet."
"Ah, to be sure: no ballet! And there used always to be a ballet! You
remember," the reader said, "how beatific it always was to have the
minor coryphees subside in nebulous ranks on either side of the stage,
and have the great planetary splendor of the _prima ballerina_ come
swiftly floating down the centre to the very footlights, beaming right
and left? Ah, there's nothing in life now like that radiant moment! But
even that was eclipsed when she rose on tiptoe and stubbed it down the
scene on the points of her slippers, with the soles of her feet showing
vertical in the act. Why couldn't we have had that to-night? Yes, we
have been cruelly wronged."
"But you don't give the true measure of our injury. You forget that
supreme instant when the master-spirit of the ballet comes skipping
suddenly forward, and leaping into the air with calves that exchange a
shimmer of kisses, and catches the _prima ballerina_ at the waist, and
tosses her aloft, and when she comes down supports her as she bends this
way and that way, and all at once stiffens for her bow to the house.
Think of our having been defrauded of that!"
"Yes, we have been wickedly defrauded." The reader was silent for a
while, and then he said: "I wonder if anybody except the choreographic
composer ever knew what the story of any ballet was? Were you ever able
to follow it?"
"Certainly not. It is bad enough following the opera. All that one
wishes to do in one case is to look, just as in the other case all one
wishes to do is to listen. We would as lief try to think out the full
meaning of a Browning poem in the pleasure it gave us, as to mix our joy
in the opera or the ballet with any severe question of their purport."
VI
THE SUPERIORITY OF OUR INFERIORS
The satirical reader introduced himself with a gleam in his eye which
kindled apprehension in the unreal editor's breast, and perhaps roused
in him a certain guilty self-consciousness.
"I didn't know," the reader said, "that you were such a well-appointed
_arbiter elegantiarum_."
"Meaning our little discourse last month on the proper form of
addressing letters?" the editor boldly grappled with the insinuation.
"Oh yes; etiquette is part of our function. We merely hadn't got round
to the matter before. You liked our remarks?"
"Very much," our visitor said, with the fine irony characteristic of
him. "All the more because I hadn't expected that sort of thing of you.
What I have expected of you hitherto was something more of the major
morality."
"But the large-sized morals did not enter into that scheme. We deal at
times with the minor morality, too, if the occasion demands, as we have
suggested. You should not have been surprised to find politeness, as
well as righteousness, advocated or applauded here. Naturally, of
course, we prefer the larger-sized morals as questions for discussion.
Had you one of the larger-sized questions of morality to present?"
"I was thinking it was a larger-sized question of manners."
"For example."
"The experience of one of those transatlantic celebrities who seem to be
rather multiplying upon us of late, and who come here with a
proclamation of their worship of American women ready to present, as if
in print, to the swarming interviewers on the pier, and who then proceed
to find fault with our civilization on every other point, almost before
they drive up to their hotels."
"But isn't that rather an old story?"
"I suppose it is rather old, but it always interests us; we are never
free from that longing for a flattered appearance in the eyes of others
which we so seldom achieve. This last, or next to last, celebrity--in
the early winter it is impossible to fix their swift succession--seems
to have suffered amaze at the rude behavior of some dairymaids in the
milk-room of the lady who was showing the celebrity over her premises. I
didn't understand the situation very clearly. The lady must have been a
lady farmer, in order to have a milk-room with dairymaids in it; but in
any case the fact is that when the lady entered with the celebrity the
maids remained seated, where they were grouped together, instead of
rising and standing in the presence of their superiors, as they would
have done in the hemisphere that the celebrity came from."
"Well, what came of it?"
"Oh, nothing. It was explained to the celebrity that the maids did not
rise because they felt themselves as good as their mistress and her
guest, and saw no reason for showing them a servile deference: that this
was the American ideal."
"In the minds of those Swedish, Irish, English, Polish, German, or
Bohemian dairymaids," we murmured, dreamily, and when our reader roused
us from our muse with a sharp "What?" we explained, "Of course they
were not American dairymaids, for it stands to reason that if they were
dairymaids they could not be Americans, or if Americans they could not
be dairymaids."
"True," our friend assented, "but all the same you admit that they were
behaving from an American ideal?"
"Yes."
"Well, that ideal is what the celebrity objects to. The celebrity
doesn't like it--on very high grounds."
"The grounds of social inequality, the inferiority of those who work to
those who pay, and the right of the superiors to the respect of the
inferiors?"
"No, the politeness due from one class to another."
"Such as lives between classes in Europe, we suppose. Well, that is very
interesting. Is it of record that the lady and her guest, on going into
the milk-room where the dairymaids remained rudely seated, bowed or
nodded to them or said, 'Good-day, young ladies'?"
"No, that is not of record."