Divorced, How to Starve and Grow Fat when I read the pompous
pronouncements of certain Voice Builders. I confess that I am not an
expert in vocal hygiene, but I have heard all the great men and women
for the past half-century who have made this drab, dreary planet worth
living on with their beautiful voices. And that is a brevet of taste.
Standards. Without standards we critically perish, says, in effect,
Mr. Brownell. I also confess that I don’t know a resonator from a
refrigerator, or the difference between a lynx and a larynx. Both
growl, I believe, if you rub them the wrong way. I have not the science
of W. J. Henderson or Holbrook Curtis. But I do know when a singer
slathers her phrases or sings above or below pitch--and there are more
who sing sharp than you think. The main thing is that I criticise by
ear, not with a laryngoscope or a mirror to peep at the breath-control.
Herbert Witherspoon, not unknown to fame as an operatic artist and
concert singer, summed up for me the situation in a phrase. “Opera
singers open their mouths too wide.” Hence screaming and bawling
which nearly splits sensitive ears. That the public likes shouting on
top-tones is only evidence of the public’s appalling taste. Noise,
noise, noise! We worship noise in America. Another neurosis. Noise
the Ultimate Vulgarity. At last the subway voice has penetrated our
opera-houses; charmless, voiceless, vicious. The three dramatic unities
in the modern theatre have resolved themselves into Legs, Glitter,
Buncombe. On the lyric stage the chief unit is yelling. No wonder they
sing and grow voiceless. Purdon Robinson, himself a concert singer
of note, in the course of an instructive lecture recently remarked:
“My own opinion, backed by thirty years of singing and teaching, has
resulted in the belief that a mechanical method makes a mechanical
singer”; and “after the voice has been placed and one has it under
control, forget it when singing. Try to get at the composer’s meaning,
realizing that words in themselves mean little, and that notes in music
are simply the symbols by which musical ideas are indicated.” For the
average vocalist words are not symbols but cymbals. But Mr. Robinson’s
words are golden.
Years ago (do sit still a moment, this is not a spun-out story of my
life!) a young woman consulted me about a vocal master. She was a choir
singer from the remote South, her parents poor as brewery mice--are
to be--and she thought she had a remarkable voice. I say “thought.”
Care killed a cat. Thought never slew a larynx. I played a hymn tune.
She sang. I shuddered, but was relieved when she told me that her name
was Elvina Crow. After all, there is something to be said for Prof.
Slawkenbergius and his theory of names as set forth by the veracious
Rev. Laurence Sterne. I suggested that if she decided on a career she
change her name to “Sgallinacciare,” which appropriately enough means
to crow; also a faulty method of singing. “Signorina Sgallinacciare!”
How that would ring in the credulous ears of the dear old deluded
public, which, Hamlet-like, doesn’t know a hawk from a hand-saw, or, if
you prefer, a hernshaw. Shriek and grow rich! Nothing else matters but
“mazuma” in the box-office of the Seven Deadly Arts.
It must have been a month after our interview that Miss Crow again
visited me. I was at the time assistant professor of applied
paleontology, and mightily interested in the psychic life of
micro-organisms, so naturally singers came first on the list. Into
my large and sympathetic tympani Elvina poured a tale, not of woe,
but of thrilling truth. This is not the first time I have related it,
yet it improves on repetition, just because of its probability. Not
discouraged by my slurring, even portamento, criticism of her voice,
the lone girl bravely started to find out the truth herself; the real
test of character. She said that her first experience was in the
studio of a maestro. She had a letter to him which he barely read. In a
rich Italian brogue he bade her be seated. He wore a velvet jacket. He
was bald. He smoked cigarettes. The type was perfect.
“I giva da lesson in fiva minuta,” he explained, and then scowled
at a tall girl who faced a mirror in a guilty manner as her eyes
computed the possible value of the newcomer’s gown. “Must I sit here
like a fool?” the professor angrily demanded. His pupil opened her
mouth. Elvina eagerly listened. But no sound escaped the lips of the
other girl. She gazed into the mirror and mouthed and grimaced, and
almost, though not quite, formed words. “Faster,” cried the teacher
at the keyboard. The student’s lips moved like a praying mill; she
clicked her teeth castanet fashion; and at last with a wild bang on
the keyboard the voiceless aria ended. The maestro knitted his dyed
eyebrows. “Vara fair, not presto assai. You sing without expression.
You are too cold--what shall I call it?” A husky voice asked: “Shall I
try it over again?” “Dio mio! girl, how dare you speak after singing
such a difficult aria from Rossini’s Cinderella? Your vocal pores are
open, you perspire with your lungs--pouf! You die of the inflammatus
by, by”--he impatiently pulled at his large nose. “The Inflammatus
by Rossini, you mean!” interposed Elvina. “How? No, no, ah! by
pneumonia, that’s it.” And he bustled from the instrument. Throwing an
old bearskin rug over his speechless singer, he led her to a chair,
admonishing her: “Now perspire!” She coughed in a terrifying way while
the maestro imperturbably explained his method to Elvina. He did not
permit his pupils to open their mouths for a year, during which time he
put them through a severe throat and lung drill. All songs were given
in vocal miming, with due facial expression, and the ventriloquist
was adduced as the highest type of masterly vocal control, for a
ventriloquist can sing in his stomach without moving a muscle of his
face. Think of Fred Stone and his Very Good Eddie. The Signor became
eloquent. Had the young Miss Elvina--Corpo di Baccho! what a pretty
name!--had she a little money for tuition? One thousand dollars. Dirt
cheap. A second Patti she would become for the money. Sign a contract
with him for ten years. Then the movies for a year so that her stage
nervousness would wear off, then vaudeville, et puis donc--grand opera.
A ravishing prospect. He rolled his eyes ecstatically as he took
Elvina’s ten-dollar bill. She escaped. To her taste the method seemed a
trifle too swift.
In another part of the town she found the atelier of Mme. Boche. She
was about to enter the anteroom unannounced when she heard low moaning
sounds, which presently increased in volume and intensity, then
suddenly died away in a sickening style. It seemed as if some animal
were undergoing vivisection, and Elvina, her sympathies aroused,
pushed open the door without knocking. It was a strange sight that met
her indignant gaze, a sight that set her wondering, and soon smiling.
On a huge mattress, which occupied half the room, were a dozen girls
in seaside bathing costume. They lay on their backs, and upon their
diaphragms rested twenty-pound weights, and from their closed lips
issued the moans made by their respiration. The Madame, a high-nosed
old dame, stood by, rattan cane in hand, and in militarist accents gave
her commands: “One, two, three--inhale! Hold breath! Shoulders--up!
Relax! Down!” And the class went patiently through this ventral drill
until completely fagged. After the order to arise a babel of chatter
ensued as Elvina told the Madame of her aspirations and the amount of
cash she possessed.
“Na! I have the only system for the breathing. My pupils know how to
breathe, how to breathe, and, again--how to breathe. There is one
necessary thing in singing, the breath. If my pupils can’t stand my
system I send them forth.”
Elvina positively feared this martinet. Her pupils’ figures were
lanky. She mildly inquired when they sang. “What, sing? Niemals,
never, jammai, jamais de la leben! You heard them breathing? Did they
breathe or no?” Then turning to her class she resumed: “Young ladies,
attention! Fall down! Relax!” Elvina slipped away, muttering as she
went: “Calisthenics, not art.” It had cost her another ten dollars.
After a hurried Automat luncheon she proceeded to a crosstown street,
the address of which she had read in the newspapers. The window
displayed this sign, “Professor Erasmus Brick, Voice Builder.” He was
a burly gentleman, the Prof. His linen was not irreproachable, his
forehead looked like a mansard roof, and his eyes were shrewd. She
named her errand, confided her doubts, hinted at the poverty of her
purse. He laughed, and his voice restored her courage, if not her
confidence. “My dear Miss, cast your eye round this room and see if
I have a piano, a looking-glass, a pulsometer, or any other foreign
fiddle-faddle of those Signors or Fraus. I build the voice up into the
perfect thing the good Lord intended it to be, and without any extry
fixin’s or bricks and mortar. The job is simple if you know how. All
this gabble about vocal registers and nasal emission makes me tired.
I build up a voice on the word ‘Moo’; jest keep ’em right at that
word till the old cow--so to speak--dies of the tune. While you sing
I work this pocket-fan. I use it to fan away the breath as you sing
‘Moo.’ By this means the lungs are unobstructed and the voice grows of
its free accord. My theory is that the breath kills the voice--Moo!”
Elvina passed out, and in the hall a phonograph hoarsely sang: “Do, re,
mi, fa, sol. Five dollars. Please put the cash on the mantelpiece.”
“That’s a dollar a note,” she calculated. She paid, and her bank-roll
became ominously slender.
She found Mlle. Pinson in her apartment, small, stuffy, crowded with
rickety furniture, books, china, music, even a parrot. The lady was
drinking chocolate. “V’là, Mamselle! I’ve purchased a frugal meal, is
it not? I diet myself as carefully as in the days when I was leading
soprano at the Grand Opera. Hélas! those miserable days when I was so
happy. Oh, Paris! Now sing ‘la,’ Mamselle. No, no, louder, please.
C’est bon. You must know that when you sing correctly the vibrations
travel to the knee-caps. I test them and know exactly if the tone is
formed naturally or not. My vibratory system is the only true one.
Yes, twenty dollars will be enough for this time. You have a sweet
voice, my dear, and I’ll make a great singer of you in five years.”
Elvina faintly asked: “When do I begin on songs?” “What! Songs? Ah!
those Americans, they are always in a hurry, what you call get rich in
a week! My child, you can’t hurry art. Bonsoir, Mamselle! To-morrow
at nine, precisely, and I’ll test your knee-caps. Take one of my
pamphlets. Vibration, vibration, vibration!” The parrot opened its
beak: “Vibration, vibration, vibration. I’m in for life, chérie. Take
me out of jail, chérie.” Elvina sat in a Madison Avenue tram and read
the booklet of Mlle. Mimi Pinson, entitled Hygiene for Voiceless
Singers. Numerous rules and “Don’ts,” ending with, “Don’t marry.
Husbands of opera-singers always collect their wives’ salaries. Vibrate
when you breathe. You may achieve fame and happiness. Think blue! It is
the color of hope. Vogue la galère!”
“This is becoming monotonous,” said Elvina aloud, and gritting her
teeth she packed her duds and returned to her home town with only one
dollar and twenty-five cents in her pocket. However, family affection,
above all family flapjacks, restored her jarred nerves to their
normal pitch. From time to time she sends me programmes of concerts
in which she is described: “Our native song-bird, Elvina, Prima
Donna Dissoluta.” As Esther Beautiful Queen (newly reorchestrated by
Stravinsky) she made a “real hit.” She may have exaggerated a little
in her confidences, but I can personally vouch for the heavy weights
on pupils’ chests to promote breathlessness. There was advocated such
a vocal system two or three decades ago in New York. Sing and grow
voiceless! Basta!
XVI
ANATOLE FRANCE: THE LAST PHASE
Anatole France is seventy-six years old, but his mind is still
vigorous, if that word be not too brisk when applied to such a subtle,
supple, undulating intelligence as his. He now writes prose glowing
with patriotism. Like the late Remy de Gourmont he shed his cynic’s
skin when war invaded his beloved land. And it was not the first time
that he, a writer of humanitarian impulses, opened the door of his
ivory tower and descended into the stormy arena; witness the Dreyfus
case. However, it would be idle to deny that his best work is well
behind him. Prefaces to letters to distinguished men and women he
occasionally publishes, such as Sur la Voie Glorieuse, or Ce que disent
nos morts; but the Anatole France of La Révolte des Anges seems to
have vanished forever. In the vast whirlwind of European events his
scepticism, irony, and pessimism have given way to pity and tenderness
for human suffering. The son of the bookseller Thibaut may figure, some
day, in a modern hagiography of those lay-saints who fought for a new
spiritual freedom.
The subject-matter composing Sur la Voie Glorieuse is altogether
patriotic and contains much that is striking. The cloven hoof of the
original faun that lurks somewhere in this Frenchman’s temperament
is shown in a passage wherein he groups the Christmas festival with
other antique festivals and symbols of Adonis and Mithra. A pagan to
the end. Possibly the best pages are devoted to a free translation
from Herodotus, a dialogue between the potentate Xerxes and a Spartan
slave. The moral rings clear. Of quite different material is fashioned
The Revolt of the Angels. We cannot conscientiously recommend the
fiction to elderly persons of either sex, though, no doubt, it is
favorite reading of the “advanced” college girl. What would be
vulgarity in another writer is turned to favor and prettiness by the
wand of the Gallic enchanter. Violence, rapine, hissing irony, and
Rabelaisian episodes make a feast for lovers of Anatolian literature.
Those who have retained any old-fashioned prejudices concerning
propriety--morality is out of the running--may expect to be shocked.
Has he not said: “Man, seek not to know thyself! Man is not a reasoning
animal.”
In this fable the deity that created us is in the new cosmology only
a tribal god, who, since he deposed Lucifer in pitched battle, rules
tyrannically. He keeps close watch on our mud-pie of a planet because
he suspects that numerous angels disguised as men and women are
fomenting a second angelic rebellion. With them are the socialists
and anarchists, and this gives M. France an opportunity to score
monarchical forms of government. The clerical order is lashed. He
spares no one. He repeats his familiar axiom: “Les guerres sont
toujours les affaires.” There are pages in which sensuality and sheer
burlesque are mingled in a disquieting compound. The book is one
of the most daring. In its essence it is a supreme revolt against
all social systems that uphold slavery: industrial, militaristic,
religious, political. The debasing Asiatic systems that still make
captive the conscience of mankind are mercilessly attacked, and while
the castigating hand is incased in velvet the shining steel is none the
less deadly.
Constable, the English landscapist, said that a good thing can’t be
done twice. Anatole France has demonstrated the contrary in his latest,
let us hope not his last book, Le Petit Pierre, another series of
exquisite notations of childhood. His delightful Livre de Mon Ami gave
us glimpses of his early days. Fascinating are the chapters devoted to
Pierre and Suzanne in this memoir. The tenderness of M. France, and his
power of summoning up the wonder and awe of our youth, may be seen in
Abeille; the development of the lad is followed in Pierre Nozière. A
portrait of the young Anatole reveals his excessive sensibility. His
head was large, the brow too broad for the feminine chin, though the
long nose and firm mouth contradict possible weakness in the lower
part of the face. It was in the eyes that the future of the child might
have been read--they were lustrous, in shape beautiful, with a fulness
that argued eloquence and imagination. Such eyes were possessed by the
boy Charles Dickens. France has told us that he was a strange child,
whose chief ambition was to be a saint, a second St. Simon Stylites,
and after that thrilling experience to write a history of France in
fifty volumes! In Le Petit Pierre his memory for the important little
events of a child’s existence is unusual; evidently nothing has been
invented, all happened. Through the haze of the immemorial years there
now and then sharply shines some significant incident, some old wives’
tales, a portrait of an elderly contemporary--like the Balzacian
Uncle Hyacinthe or the incomparable evocation of the beloved servant
Mélanie--a dog, like Caire, the truant parrot, the boy chimney-sweep,
and the sweet smile of Pierre’s mother, who seems to be every one’s
mother so admirably generalized is the type--what a magician is this
writer! Told with naïveté and verve, we feel in every page of Le Petit
Pierre the charm of personality.
In clarity Anatole France is the equal of Renan and John Henry Newman,
and, while at one time clarity was a conventional quality of French
prose, it is rarer to-day. Symbolism has supervened, if not to darken
counsel, certainly to trouble verbal values. Never syncopated, moving
at a moderate tempo, in transitions smooth, replete with sensitive
rejections, crystalline in diction, a lover and a master of large,
luminous words, the very marrow of the man, Anatole France is in his
style. And what a model he should be for those wilful young writers
who boast that lumpy, graceless paragraphs are better suited to their
subjects than swift, clear, concise prose. It was not so long ago that
one scribe positively glorified in his own dull style; he asserted that
it was a truthful reflection of his drab themes. There is, indeed, such
a thing as an apposite garbing, a verbal orchestration. The pellucid
sentences of Mr. Howells, so free from the overblown, are happily
wedded to his admirable character etching. Flaubert, master of ornate,
or “numerous” prose, as well as cool, rhythmic prose, wrote Salammbô in
a purple, splendid key, and Madame Bovary in the greyer tonalities of
the province; yet nothing could be further removed from the style of
either novel than Sentimental Education, which is urban and suffused
with sober daylight. It was a favorite contention of de Gourmont that
at his sovereign best Flaubert is to be found in Bouvard et Pécuchet,
the style of which is sinewy, pregnant, powerful. The principal mistake
of beginners is to believe that ornament is good style. In Anatole
France matter and manner are perfectly welded.
Few writers swim so easily as he under their heavy burdens of
erudition. His knowledge is precise, his range wide. He is a humanist.
He knows many literatures. He loves learning for the sake of learning.
He loves words, treasures them, fondles them, burnishes anew their
meanings tarnished by custom. He seldom tarries in the half-way house
of epigram. Over all, his interest in humanity sheds a tranquil glow.
Without a marked feeling for the dramatic, nevertheless, he surprises
mankind engaged in its minute daily acts; those he renders as candidly
as snow in the sunshine; just as the old Dutch painters stir our
“emotion of recognition” with a simple shaft of light passing through a
half-open door, or upon an old wrinkled woman polishing her spectacles.
He sees and notes many gestures, inutile or tragic, and notes them with
the enthralling simplicity of a complicated artistic nature. He deals
with ideas so vitally that they seem human. Yet his personages are
never abstractions, nor do they serve as pallid allegories. They are
all alive from Sylvestre Bonnard to the group that meets to chat in the
Foro Romano (Sur la Pierre Blanche); from his Penguins to his Angels. A
dog, a cat, he depicts with the same love; his dog Riquet bids fair to
endure in literature. France is an interpreter of life, not precisely
after the manner of the novelist, but life as viewed through the
temperament of a poet of extreme delicacy and one doubled by a tolerant
philosopher.
This ultramodern thinker, who has outgrown the despotism of positivist
dogma, has the soul of a chameleon. He loves, he understands,
Christianity with a fervor and a knowledge that surprise, until we
measure the depth of his affection for antique cultures. Further to
confuse us, he exhibits sympathy with the Hebraic lore. He has rifled
the Talmud for half-forgotten tales. He delights in juxtaposing the
Greek sophist and the strenuous Paul. He contrasts Mary Magdalen
repentant with a pampered Roman matron. He is familiar with the
proceeds of science, particularly astronomy. With the scholastic
speculations of the Renaissance, with the simple affirmations of
mediæval piety, he is as conversant as with the destructive Pyrrhonism
of a boulevard philosopher. So commingled are his contradictory
cultures, so numerous his angles, so avid of impressions is he, that
we end in wholly admiring the exercise of a beneficent magic that can
blend into a happy synthesis moral dissonances and harmonize such a
bewildering moral preciosity. But there are moments when we regard the
operation as intellectual legerdemain. We suspect dupery. However, it
is his humor that is the most potent of his solvents. This humor often
transforms a doubtful battle into radiant victory. We see him, the
protagonist of his own psychical comedy, dancing on a tight rope in the
airiest fashion, deliciously capering in the metaphysical void, and,
like a prestidigitator, bidding us doubt the very existence of his rope.
Proofs from life gay pagan Anatole does not demand. He has the
hesitations of profound erudition. Possessing the gift of paradox, he
rejoices in his philosophic indifferentism. Notwithstanding his famous
phrase, “the mania of certitude,” Renan was ever pursued by the idea of
an Absolute. He cried for proof. To Bertholet he wrote: “I am eager for
mathematics.” To him numbers promised rigid reality. Not so, however,
to M. France, who could have asked with Ibsen whether two added to two
do not make five on the planet Jupiter! To Montaigne’s “What know I?”
he opposes the injunction of Rabelais: “Do what thou wilt!” Of Plato
he might have asked, “What is Truth?” and if Plato in turn would have
posed the same question, Anatole could reply by handing him a copy of
Jardin d’Epicure, that perfect breviary of Anatolian scepticism. In
Socrates perhaps he would discover a congenial companion; yet he might
mischievously allude to Montaigne “concerning cats,” or quote Aristotle
as to the form of hats. And then we spy him adorning the Wheel of Ixion
with garlands. A wilful child of belles-lettres and philosophy, M.
France always may be expected to utter the starting, lucent phrase.