spectacle that exists on the earth. There are many mountains of snow that are as lofty as the Jungfrau and as nobly proportioned, but they lack the fame. They stand at large; they are intruded upon and elbowed by neighboring domes and summits, and their grandeur is diminished and fails of effect.
It is a good name, Jungfrau–Virgin. Nothing could be whiter; nothing could be purer; nothing could be saintlier of aspect. At six yesterday evening the great intervening barrier seen through a faint bluish haze seemed made of air and substanceless, so soft and rich it was, so shimmering where the wandering lights touched it and so dim where the shadows lay. Apparently it was a dream stuff, a work of the imagination, nothing real about it. The tint was green, slightly varying shades of it, but mainly very dark. The sun was down–as far as that barrier was concerned, but not for the Jungfrau, towering into the heavens beyond the gateway. She was a roaring conflagration of blinding white.
It is said the Fridolin (the old Fridolin), a new saint, but formerly a missionary, gave the mountain its gracious name. He was an Irishman, son of an Irish king–there were thirty thousand kings reigning in County Cork alone in his time, fifteen hundred years ago. It got so that they could not make a living, there was so much competition and wages got cut so. Some of them were out of work months at a time, with wife and little children to feed, and not a crust in the place. At last a particularly severe winter fell upon the country, and hundreds of them were reduced to mendicancy and were to be seen day after day in the bitterest weather, standing barefoot in the snow, holding out their crowns for alms. Indeed, they would have been obliged to emigrate or starve but for a fortunate idea of Prince Fridolin’s, who started a labor-union, the first one in history, and got the great bulk of them to join it. He thus won the general gratitude, and they wanted to make him emperor–emperor over them all–emperor of County Cork, but he said, No, walking delegate was good enough for him. For behold! he was modest beyond his years, and keen as a whip. To this day in Germany and Switzerland, where St. Fridolin is revered and honored, the peasantry speak of him affectionately as the first walking delegate.
The first walk he took was into France and Germany, missionarying–for missionarying was a better thing in those days than it is in ours. All you had to do was to cure the savage’s sick daughter by a “miracle”–a miracle like the miracle of Lourdes in our day, for instance–and immediately that head savage was your convert, and filled to the eyes with a new convert’s enthusiasm. You could sit down and make yourself easy, now. He would take an ax and convert the rest of the nation himself. Charlemagne was that kind of a walking delegate.
Yes, there were great missionaries in those days, for the methods were sure and the rewards great. We have no such missionaries now, and no such methods.
But to continue the history of the first walking delegate, if you are interested. I am interested myself because I have seen his relics in Sackingen, and also the very spot where he worked his great miracle–the one which won him his sainthood in the papal court a few centuries later. To have seen these things makes me feel very near to him, almost like a member of the family, in fact. While wandering about the Continent he arrived at the spot on the Rhine which is now occupied by Sackingen, and proposed to settle there, but the people warned him off. He appealed to the king of the Franks, who made him a present of the whole region, people and all. He built a great cloister there for women and proceeded to teach in it and accumulate more land. There were two wealthy brothers in the neighborhood, Urso and Landulph. Urso died and Fridolin claimed his estates. Landulph asked for documents and papers. Fridolin had none to show. He said the bequest had been made to him by word of mouth. Landulph suggested that he produce a witness and said it in a way which he thought was very witty, very sarcastic. This shows that he did not know the walking delegate. Fridolin was not disturbed. He said:
“Appoint your court. I will bring a witness.”
The court thus created consisted of fifteen counts and barons. A day was appointed for the trial of the case. On that day the judges took their seats in state, and proclamation was made that the court was ready for business. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed, and yet no Fridolin appeared. Landulph rose, and was in the act of claiming judgment by default when a strange clacking sound was heard coming up the stairs. In another moment Fridolin entered at the door and came walking in a deep hush down the middle aisle, with a tall skeleton stalking in his rear.
Amazement and terror sat upon every countenance, for everybody suspected that the skeleton was Urso’s. It stopped before the chief judge and raised its bony arm aloft and began to speak, while all the assembled shuddered, for they could see the words leak out between its ribs. It said:
“Brother, why dost thou disturb my blessed rest and withhold by robbery the gift which I gave thee for the honor of God?”
It seems a strange thing and most irregular, but the verdict was actually given against Landulph on the testimony of this wandering rack-heap of unidentified bones. In our day a skeleton would not be allowed to testify at all, for a skeleton has no moral responsibility, and its word could not be believed on oath, and this was probably one of them. However, the incident is valuable as preserving to us a curious sample of the quaint laws of evidence of that remote time–a time so remote, so far back toward the beginning of original idiocy, that the difference between a bench of judges and a basket of vegetables was as yet so slight that we may say with all confidence that it didn’t really exist.
During several afternoons I have been engaged in an interesting, maybe useful, piece of work–that is to say, I have been trying to make the mighty Jungfrau earn her living–earn it in a most humble sphere, but on a prodigious scale, on a prodigious scale of necessity, for she couldn’t do anything in a small way with her size and style. I have been trying to make her do service on a stupendous dial and check off the hours as they glide along her pallid face up there against the sky, and tell the time of day to the populations lying within fifty miles of her and to the people in the moon, if they have a good telescope there.
Until late in the afternoon the Jungfrau’s aspect is that of a spotless desert of snow set upon edge against the sky. But by mid-afternoon some elevations which rise out of the western border of the desert, whose presence you perhaps had not detected or suspected up to that time, began to cast black shadows eastward across the gleaming surface. At first there is only one shadow; later there are two. Toward 4 P.M. the other day I was gazing and worshiping as usual when I chanced to notice that shadow No. 1 was beginning to take itself something of the shape of the human profile. By four the back of the head was good, the military cap was pretty good, the nose was bold and strong, the upper lip sharp, but not pretty, and there was a great goatee that shot straight aggressively forward from the chin.
At four-thirty the nose had changed its shape considerably, and the altered slant of the sun had revealed and made conspicuous a huge buttress or barrier of naked rock which was so located as to answer very well for a shoulder or coat-collar to this swarthy and indiscreet sweetheart who had stolen out there right before everybody to pillow his head on the Virgin’s white breast and whisper soft sentimentalities to her in the sensuous music of the crashing ice-domes and the boom and thunder of the passing avalanche–music very familiar to his ear, for he had heard it every afternoon at this hour since the day he first came courting this child of the earth, who lives in the sky, and that day is far, yes–for he was at this pleasant sport before the Middle Ages drifted by him in the valley; before the Romans marched past, and before the antique and recordless barbarians fished and hunted here and wondered who he might be, and were probably afraid of him; and before primeval man himself, just emerged from his four-footed estate, stepped out upon this plain, first sample of his race, a thousand centuries ago, and cast a glad eye up there, judging he had found a brother human being and consequently something to kill; and before the big saurians wallowed here, still some eons earlier. Oh yes, a day so far back that the eternal son was present to see that first visit; a day so far back that neither tradition nor history was born yet and a whole weary eternity must come and go before the restless little creature, of whose face this stupendous Shadow Face was the prophecy, would arrive in the earth and begin his shabby career and think of a big thing. Oh, indeed yes; when you talk about your poor Roman and Egyptian day-before-yesterday antiquities, you should choose a time when the hoary Shadow Face of the Jungfrau is not by. It antedates all antiquities known or imaginable; for it was here the world itself created the theater of future antiquities. And it is the only witness with a human face that was there to see the marvel, and remains to us a memorial of it.
By 4:40 P.M. the nose of the shadow is perfect and is beautiful. It is black and is powerfully marked against the upright canvas of glowing snow, and covers hundreds of acres of that resplendent surface.
Meantime shadow No. 2 has been creeping out well to the rear of the face west of it–and at five o’clock has assumed a shape that has rather a poor and rude semblance of a shoe.
Meantime, also, the great Shadow Face has been gradually changing for twenty minutes, and now, 5 P.M., it is becoming a quite fair portrait of Roscoe Conkling. The likeness is there, and is unmistakable. The goatee is shortened, now, and has an end; formerly it hadn’t any, but ran off eastward and arrived nowhere.
By 6 P.M. the face has dissolved and gone, and the goatee has become what looks like the shadow of a tower with a pointed roof, and the shoe had turned into what the printers call a “fist” with a finger pointing.
If I were now imprisoned on a mountain summit a hundred miles northward of this point, and was denied a timepiece, I could get along well enough from four till six on clear days, for I could keep trace of the time by the changing shapes of these mighty shadows of the Virgin’s front, the most stupendous dial I am acquainted with, the oldest clock in the world by a couple of million years.
I suppose I should not have noticed the forms of the shadows if I hadn’t the habit of hunting for faces in the clouds and in mountain crags–a sort of amusement which is very entertaining even when you don’t find any, and brilliantly satisfying when you do. I have searched through several bushels of photographs of the Jungfrau here, but found only one with the Face in it, and in this case it was not strictly recognizable as a face, which was evidence that the picture was taken before four o’clock in the afternoon, and also evidence that all the photographers have persistently overlooked one of the most fascinating features of the Jungfrau show. I say fascinating, because if you once detect a human face produced on a great plan by unconscious nature, you never get tired of watching it. At first you can’t make another person see it at all, but after he has made it out once he can’t see anything else afterward.
The King of Greece is a man who goes around quietly enough when off duty. One day this summer he was traveling in an ordinary first-class compartment, just in his other suit, the one which he works the realm in when he is at home, and so he was not looking like anybody in particular, but a good deal like everybody in general. By and by a hearty and healthy German- American got in and opened up a frank and interesting and sympathetic conversation with him, and asked him a couple of thousand questions about himself, which the king answered good- naturedly, but in a more or less indefinite way as to private particulars.
“Where do you live when you are at home?”
“In Greece.”
“Greece! Well, now, that is just astonishing! Born there?”
“No.”
“Do you speak Greek?”
“Yes.”
“Now, ain’t that strange! I never expected to live to see that. What is your trade? I mean how do you get your living? What is your line of business?”
“Well, I hardly know how to answer. I am only a kind of foreman, on a salary; and the business–well, is a very general kind of business.”
“Yes, I understand–general jobbing–little of everything– anything that there’s money in.”
“That’s about it, yes.”
“Are you traveling for the house now?”
“Well, partly; but not entirely. Of course I do a stroke of business if it falls in the way–“
“Good! I like that in you! That’s me every time. Go on.”
“I was only going to say I am off on my vacation now.”
“Well that’s all right. No harm in that. A man works all the better for a little let-up now and then. Not that I’ve been used to having it myself; for I haven’t. I reckon this is my first. I was born in Germany, and when I was a couple of weeks old shipped to America, and I’ve been there ever since, and that’s sixty-four years by the watch. I’m an American in principle and a German at heart, and it’s the boss combination. Well, how do you get along, as a rule–pretty fair?”
“I’ve a rather large family–“
“There, that’s it–big family and trying to raise them on a salary. Now, what did you go to do that for?”
“Well, I thought–“
“Of course you did. You were young and confident and thought you could branch out and make things go with a whirl, and here you are, you see! But never mind about that. I’m not trying to discourage you. Dear me! I’ve been just where you are myself! You’ve got good grit; there’s good stuff in you, I can see that. You got a wrong start, that’s the whole trouble. But you hold your grip, and we’ll see what can be done. Your case ain’t half as bad as it might be. You are going to come out all right–I’m bail for that. Boys and girls?”
“My family? Yes, some of them are boys–“
“And the rest girls. It’s just as I expected. But that’s all right, and it’s better so, anyway. What are the boys doing– learning a trade?”
“Well, no–I thought–“
“It’s a big mistake. It’s the biggest mistake you ever made. You see that in your own case. A man ought always to have a trade to fall back on. Now, I was harness-maker at first. Did that prevent me from becoming one of the biggest brewers in America? Oh no. I always had the harness trick to fall back on in rough weather. Now, if you had learned how to make harness– However, it’s too late now; too late. But it’s no good plan to cry over spilt milk. But as to the boys, you see–what’s to become of them if anything happens to you?”
“It has been my idea to let the eldest one succeed me–“
“Oh, come! Suppose the firm don’t want him?”
“I hadn’t thought of that, but–“
“Now, look here; you want to get right down to business and stop dreaming. You are capable of immense things–man. You can make a perfect success in life. All you want is somebody to steady you and boost you along on the right road. Do you own anything in the business?”
“No–not exactly; but if I continue to give satisfaction, I suppose I can keep my–“
“Keep your place–yes. Well, don’t you depend on anything of the kind. They’ll bounce you the minute you get a little old and worked out; they’ll do it sure. Can’t you manage somehow to get into the firm? That’s the great thing, you know.”
“I think it is doubtful; very doubtful.”
“Um–that’s bad–yes, and unfair, too. Do you suppose that if I should go there and have a talk with your people–Look here–do you think you could run a brewery?”
“I have never tried, but I think I could do it after a little familiarity with the business.”
The German was silent for some time. He did a good deal of thinking, and the king waited curiously to see what the result was going to be. Finally the German said:
“My mind’s made up. You leave that crowd–you’ll never amount to anything there. In these old countries they never give a fellow a show. Yes, you come over to America–come to my place in Rochester; bring the family along. You shall have a show in the business and the foremanship, besides. George–you said your name was George?–I’ll make a man of you. I give you my word. You’ve never had a chance here, but that’s all going to change. By gracious! I’ll give you a lift that’ll make your hair curl!”
——————————————————————
AT THE SHRINE OF ST. WAGNER
Bayreuth, Aug. 2d, 1891
It was at Nuremberg that we struck the inundation of music- mad strangers that was rolling down upon Bayreuth. It had been long since we had seen such multitudes of excited and struggling people. It took a good half-hour to pack them and pair them into the train–and it was the longest train we have yet seen in Europe. Nuremberg had been witnessing this sort of experience a couple of times a day for about two weeks. It gives one an impressive sense of the magnitude of this biennial pilgrimage. For a pilgrimage is what it is. The devotees come from the very ends of the earth to worship their prophet in his own Kaaba in his own Mecca.
If you are living in New York or San Francisco or Chicago or anywhere else in America, and you conclude, by the middle of May, that you would like to attend the Bayreuth opera two months and a half later, you must use the cable and get about it immediately or you will get no seats, and you must cable for lodgings, too. Then if you are lucky you will get seats in the last row and lodgings in the fringe of the town. If you stop to write you will get nothing. There were plenty of people in Nuremberg when we passed through who had come on pilgrimage without first securing seats and lodgings. They had found neither in Bayreuth; they had walked Bayreuth streets a while in sorrow, then had gone to Nuremberg and found neither beds nor standing room, and had walked those quaint streets all night, waiting for the hotels to open and empty their guests into trains, and so make room for these, their defeated brethren and sisters in the faith. They had endured from thirty to forty hours’ railroading on the continent of Europe–with all which that implies of worry, fatigue, and financial impoverishment–and all they had got and all they were to get for it was handiness and accuracy in kicking themselves, acquired by practice in the back streets of the two towns when other people were in bed; for back they must go over that unspeakable journey with their pious mission unfulfilled. These humiliated outcasts had the frowsy and unbrushed and apologetic look of wet cats, and their eyes were glazed with drowsiness, their bodies were adroop from crown to sole, and all kind-hearted people refrained from asking them if they had been to Bayreuth and failed to connect, as knowing they would lie.
We reached here (Bayreuth) about mid-afternoon of a rainy Saturday. We were of the wise, and had secured lodgings and opera seats months in advance.
I am not a musical critic, and did not come here to write essays about the operas and deliver judgment upon their merits. The little children of Bayreuth could do that with a finer sympathy and a broader intelligence than I. I only care to bring four or five pilgrims to the operas, pilgrims able to appreciate them and enjoy them. What I write about the performance to put in my odd time would be offered to the public as merely a cat’s view of a king, and not of didactic value.
Next day, which was Sunday, we left for the opera-house– that is to say, the Wagner temple–a little after the middle of the afternoon. The great building stands all by itself, grand and lonely, on a high ground outside the town. We were warned that if we arrived after four o’clock we should be obliged to pay two dollars and a half extra by way of fine. We saved that; and it may be remarked here that this is the only opportunity that Europe offers of saving money. There was a big crowd in the grounds about the building, and the ladies’ dresses took the sun with fine effect. I do not mean to intimate that the ladies were in full dress, for that was not so. The dresses were pretty, but neither sex was in evening dress.
The interior of the building is simple–severely so; but there is no occasion for color and decoration, since the people sit in the dark. The auditorium has the shape of a keystone, with the stage at the narrow end. There is an aisle on each side, but no aisle in the body of the house. Each row of seats extends in an unbroken curve from one side of the house to the other. There are seven entrance doors on each side of the theater and four at the butt, eighteen doors to admit and emit 1,650 persons. The number of the particular door by which you are to enter the house or leave it is printed on your ticket, and you can use no door but that one. Thus, crowding and confusion are impossible. Not so many as a hundred people use any one door. This is better than having the usual (and useless) elaborate fireproof arrangements. It is the model theater of the world. It can be emptied while the second hand of a watch makes its circuit. It would be entirely safe, even if it were built of lucifer matches.
If your seat is near the center of a row and you enter late you must work your way along a rank of about twenty-five ladies and gentlemen to get to it. Yet this causes no trouble, for everybody stands up until all the seats are full, and the filling is accomplished in a very few minutes. Then all sit down, and you have a solid mass of fifteen hundred heads, making a steep cellar-door slant from the rear of the house down to the stage.
All the lights were turned low, so low that the congregation sat in a deep and solemn gloom. The funereal rustling of dresses and the low buzz of conversation began to die swiftly down, and presently not the ghost of a sound was left. This profound and increasingly impressive stillness endured for some time–the best preparation for music, spectacle, or speech conceivable. I should think our show people would have invented or imported that simple and impressive device for securing and solidifying the attention of an audience long ago; instead of which there continue to this day to open a performance against a deadly competition in the form of noise, confusion, and a scattered interest.
Finally, out of darkness and distance and mystery soft rich notes rose upon the stillness, and from his grave the dead magician began to weave his spells about his disciples and steep their souls in his enchantments. There was something strangely impressive in the fancy which kept intruding itself that the composer was conscious in his grave of what was going on here, and that these divine souls were the clothing of thoughts which were at this moment passing through his brain, and not recognized and familiar ones which had issued from it at some former time.
The entire overture, long as it was, was played to a dark house with the curtain down. It was exquisite; it was delicious. But straightway thereafter, or course, came the singing, and it does seem to me that nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts. I wish I could see a Wagner opera done in pantomime once. Then one would have the lovely orchestration unvexed to listen to and bathe his spirit in, and the bewildering beautiful scenery to intoxicate his eyes with, and the dumb acting couldn’t mar these pleasures, because there isn’t often anything in the Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting; as a rule all you would see would be a couple of silent people, one of them standing still, the other catching flies. Of course I do not really mean that he would be catching flies; I only mean that the usual operatic gestures which consist in reaching first one hand out into the air and then the other might suggest the sport I speak of if the operator attended strictly to business and uttered no sound.
This present opera was “Parsifal.” Madame Wagner does not permit its representation anywhere but in Bayreuth. The first act of the three occupied two hours, and I enjoyed that in spite of the singing.
I trust that I know as well as anybody that singing is one of the most entrancing and bewitching and moving and eloquent of all the vehicles invented by man for the conveying of feeling; but it seems to me that the chief virtue in song is melody, air, tune, rhythm, or what you please to call it, and that when this feature is absent what remains is a picture with the color left out. I was not able to detect in the vocal parts of “Parsifal” anything that might with confidence be called rhythm or tune or melody; one person performed at a time–and a long time, too– often in a noble, and always in a high-toned, voice; but he only pulled out long notes, then some short ones, then another long one, then a sharp, quick, peremptory bark or two–and so on and so on; and when he was done you saw that the information which he had conveyed had not compensated for the disturbance. Not always, but pretty often. If two of them would but put in a duet occasionally and blend the voices; but no, they don’t do that. The great master, who knew so well how to make a hundred instruments rejoice in unison and pour out their souls in mingled and melodious tides of delicious sound, deals only in barren solos when he puts in the vocal parts. It may be that he was deep, and only added the singing to his operas for the sake of the contrast it would make with the music. Singing! It does seem the wrong name to apply to it. Strictly described, it is a practicing of difficult and unpleasant intervals, mainly. An ignorant person gets tired of listening to gymnastic intervals in the long run, no matter how pleasant they may be. In “Parsifal” there is a hermit named Gurnemanz who stands on the stage in one spot and practices by the hour, while first one and then another character of the cast endures what he can of it and then retires to die.
During the evening there was an intermission of three- quarters of an hour after the first act and one an hour long after the second. In both instances the theater was totally emptied. People who had previously engaged tables in the one sole eating-house were able to put in their time very satisfactorily; the other thousand went hungry. The opera was concluded at ten in the evening or a little later. When we reached home we had been gone more than seven hours. Seven hours at five dollars a ticket is almost too much for the money.
While browsing about the front yard among the crowd between the acts I encountered twelve or fifteen friends from different parts of America, and those of them who were most familiar with Wagner said that “Parsifal” seldom pleased at first, but that after one had heard it several times it was almost sure to become a favorite. It seemed impossible, but it was true, for the statement came from people whose word was not to be doubted.
And I gathered some further information. On the ground I found part of a German musical magazine, and in it a letter written by Uhlic thirty-three years ago, in which he defends the scorned and abused Wagner against people like me, who found fault with the comprehensive absence of what our kind regards as singing. Uhlic says Wagner despised “JENE PLAPPERUDE MUSIC,” and therefore “runs, trills, and SCHNORKEL are discarded by him.” I don’t know what a SCHNORKEL is, but now that I know it has been left out of these operas I never have missed so much in my life. And Uhlic further says that Wagner’s song is true: that it is “simply emphasized intoned speech.” That certainly describes it –in “Parsifal” and some of the operas; and if I understand Uhlic’s elaborate German he apologizes for the beautiful airs in “Tannh:auser.” Very well; now that Wagner and I understand each other, perhaps we shall get along better, and I shall stop calling Waggner, on the American plan, and thereafter call him Waggner as per German custom, for I feel entirely friendly now. The minute we get reconciled to a person, how willing we are to throw aside little needless puctilios and pronounce his name right!
Of course I came home wondering why people should come from all corners of America to hear these operas, when we have lately had a season or two of them in New York with these same singers in the several parts, and possibly this same orchestra. I resolved to think that out at all hazards.
TUESDAY.–Yesterday they played the only operatic favorite I have ever had–an opera which has always driven me mad with ignorant delight whenever I have heard it–“Tannh:auser.” I heard it first when I was a youth; I heard it last in the last German season in New York. I was busy yesterday and I did not intend to go, knowing I should have another “Tannh:auser” opportunity in a few days; but after five o’clock I found myself free and walked out to the opera-house and arrived about the beginning of the second act. My opera ticket admitted me to the grounds in front, past the policeman and the chain, and I thought I would take a rest on a bench for an hour and two and wait for the third act.
In a moment or so the first bugles blew, and the multitude began to crumble apart and melt into the theater. I will explain that this bugle-call is one of the pretty features here. You see, the theater is empty, and hundreds of the audience are a good way off in the feeding-house; the first bugle-call is blown about a quarter of an hour before time for the curtain to rise. This company of buglers, in uniform, march out with military step and send out over the landscape a few bars of the theme of the approaching act, piercing the distances with the gracious notes; then they march to the other entrance and repeat. Presently they do this over again. Yesterday only about two hundred people were still left in front of the house when the second call was blown; in another half-minute they would have been in the house, but then a thing happened which delayed them–the only solitary thing in this world which could be relied on with certainty to accomplish it, I suppose–an imperial princess appeared in the balcony above them. They stopped dead in their tracks and began to gaze in a stupor of gratitude and satisfaction. The lady presently saw that she must disappear or the doors would be closed upon these worshipers, so she returned to her box. This daughter-in-law of an emperor was pretty; she had a kind face; she was without airs; she is known to be full of common human sympathies. There are many kinds of princesses, but this kind is the most harmful of all, for wherever they go they reconcile people to monarchy and set back the clock of progress. The valuable princes, the desirable princes, are the czars and their sort. By their mere dumb presence in the world they cover with derision every argument that can be invented in favor of royalty by the most ingenious casuist. In his time the husband of this princess was valuable. He led a degraded life, he ended it with his own hand in circumstances and surroundings of a hideous sort, and was buried like a god.
In the opera-house there is a long loft back of the audience, a kind of open gallery, in which princes are displayed. It is sacred to them; it is the holy of holies. As soon as the filling of the house is about complete the standing multitude turn and fix their eyes upon the princely layout and gaze mutely and longingly and adoringly and regretfully like sinners looking into heaven. They become rapt, unconscious, steeped in worship. There is no spectacle anywhere that is more pathetic than this. It is worth crossing many oceans to see. It is somehow not the same gaze that people rivet upon a Victor Hugo, or Niagara, or the bones of the mastodon, or the guillotine of the Revolution, or the great pyramid, or distant Vesuvius smoking in the sky, or any man long celebrated to you by his genius and achievements, or thing long celebrated to you by the praises of books and pictures–no, that gaze is only the gaze of intense curiosity, interest, wonder, engaged in drinking delicious deep draughts that taste good all the way down and appease and satisfy the thirst of a lifetime. Satisfy it–that is the word. Hugo and the mastodon will still have a degree of intense interest thereafter when encountered, but never anything approaching the ecstasy of that first view. The interest of a prince is different. It may be envy, it may be worship, doubtless it is a mixture of both–and it does not satisfy its thirst with one view, or even noticeably diminish it. Perhaps the essence of the thing is the value which men attach to a valuable something which has come by luck and not been earned. A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to you than the ninety-and-nine which you had to work for, and money won at faro or in stocks snuggles into your heart in the same way. A prince picks up grandeur, power, and a permanent holiday and gratis support by a pure accident, the accident of birth, and he stands always before the grieved eye of poverty and obscurity a monumental representative of luck. And then–supremest value of all-his is the only high fortune on the earth which is secure. The commercial millionaire may become a beggar; the illustrious statesman can make a vital mistake and be dropped and forgotten; the illustrious general can lose a decisive battle and with it the consideration of men; but once a prince always a prince–that is to say, an imitation god, and neither hard fortune nor an infamous character nor an addled brain nor the speech of an ass can undeify him. By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved. It follows without doubt or question, then, that the most desirable position possible is that of a prince. And I think it also follows that the so-called usurpations with which history is littered are the most excusable misdemeanors which men have committed. To usurp a usurpation–that is all it amounts to, isn’t it?
A prince is not to us what he is to a European, of course. We have not been taught to regard him as a god, and so one good look at him is likely to so nearly appease our curiosity as to make him an object of no greater interest the next time. We want a fresh one. But it is not so with the European. I am quite sure of it. The same old one will answer; he never stales. Eighteen years ago I was in London and I called at an Englishman’s house on a bleak and foggy and dismal December afternoon to visit his wife and married daughter by appointment. I waited half an hour and then they arrived, frozen. They explained that they had been delayed by an unlooked-for circumstance: while passing in the neighborhood of Marlborough House they saw a crowd gathering and were told that the Prince of Wales was about to drive out, so they stopped to get a sight of him. They had waited half an hour on the sidewalk, freezing with the crowd, but were disappointed at last–the Prince had changed his mind. I said, with a good deal of surprise, “Is it possible that you two have lived in London all your lives and have never seen the Prince of Wales?”
Apparently it was their turn to be surprised, for they exclaimed: “What an idea! Why, we have seen him hundreds of times.”
They had seem him hundreds of times, yet they had waited half an hour in the gloom and the bitter cold, in the midst of a jam of patients from the same asylum, on the chance of seeing him again. It was a stupefying statement, but one is obliged to believe the English, even when they say a thing like that. I fumbled around for a remark, and got out this one:
“I can’t understand it at all. If I had never seen General Grant I doubt if I would do that even to get a sight of him.” With a slight emphasis on the last word.
Their blank faces showed that they wondered where the parallel came in. Then they said, blankly: “Of course not. He is only a President.”
It is doubtless a fact that a prince is a permanent interest, an interest not subject to deterioration. The general who was never defeated, the general who never held a council of war, the only general who ever commanded a connected battle-front twelve hundred miles long, the smith who welded together the broken parts of a great republic and re-established it where it is quite likely to outlast all the monarchies present and to come, was really a person of no serious consequence to these people. To them, with their training, my General was only a man, after all, while their Prince was clearly much more than that–a being of a wholly unsimilar construction and constitution, and being of no more blood and kinship with men than are the serene eternal lights of the firmament with the poor dull tallow candles of commerce that sputter and die and leave nothing behind but a pinch of ashes and a stink.
I saw the last act of “Tannh:auser.” I sat in the gloom and the deep stillness, waiting–one minute, two minutes, I do not know exactly how long–then the soft music of the hidden orchestra began to breathe its rich, long sighs out from under the distant stage, and by and by the drop-curtain parted in the middle and was drawn softly aside, disclosing the twilighted wood and a wayside shrine, with a white-robed girl praying and a man standing near. Presently that noble chorus of men’s voices was heard approaching, and from that moment until the closing of the curtain it was music, just music–music to make one drunk with pleasure, music to make one take scrip and staff and beg his way round the globe to hear it.
To such as are intending to come here in the Wagner season next year I wish to say, bring your dinner-pail with you. If you do, you will never cease to be thankful. If you do not, you will find it a hard fight to save yourself from famishing in Bayreuth. Bayreuth is merely a large village, and has no very large hotels or eating-houses. The principal inns are the Golden Anchor and the Sun. At either of these places you can get an excellent meal–no, I mean you can go there and see other people get it. There is no charge for this. The town is littered with restaurants, but they are small and bad, and they are overdriven with custom. You must secure a table hours beforehand, and often when you arrive you will find somebody occupying it. We have had this experience. We have had a daily scramble for life; and when I say we, I include shoals of people. I have the impression that the only people who do not have to scramble are the veterans–the disciples who have been here before and know the ropes. I think they arrive about a week before the first opera, and engage all the tables for the season. My tribe had tried all kinds of places–some outside of the town, a mile or two–and have captured only nibblings and odds and ends, never in any instance a complete and satisfying meal. Digestible? No, the reverse. These odds and ends are going to serve as souvenirs of Bayreuth, and in that regard their value is not to be overestimated. Photographs fade, bric-a-brac gets lost, busts of Wagner get broken, but once you absorb a Bayreuth-restaurant meal it is your possession and your property until the time comes to embalm the rest of you. Some of these pilgrims here become, in effect, cabinets; cabinets of souvenirs of Bayreuth. It is believed among scientists that you could examine the crop of a dead Bayreuth pilgrim anywhere in the earth and tell where he came from. But I like this ballast. I think a “Hermitage” scrap-up at eight in the evening, when all the famine-breeders have been there and laid in their mementoes and gone, is the quietest thing you can lay on your keelson except gravel.
THURSDAY.–They keep two teams of singers in stock for the chief roles, and one of these is composed of the most renowned artists in the world, with Materna and Alvary in the lead. I suppose a double team is necessary; doubtless a single team would die of exhaustion in a week, for all the plays last from four in the afternoon till ten at night. Nearly all the labor falls upon the half-dozen head singers, and apparently they are required to furnish all the noise they can for the money. If they feel a soft, whispery, mysterious feeling they are required to open out and let the public know it. Operas are given only on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, with three days of ostensible rest per week, and two teams to do the four operas; but the ostensible rest is devoted largely to rehearsing. It is said that the off days are devoted to rehearsing from some time in the morning till ten at night. Are there two orchestras also? It is quite likely, since there are one hundred and ten names in the orchestra list.
Yesterday the opera was “Tristan and Isolde.” I have seen all sorts of audiences–at theaters, operas, concerts, lectures, sermons, funerals–but none which was twin to the Wagner audience of Bayreuth for fixed and reverential attention. Absolute attention and petrified retention to the end of an act of the attitude assumed at the beginning of it. You detect no movement in the solid mass of heads and shoulders. You seem to sit with the dead in the gloom of a tomb. You know that they are being stirred to their profoundest depths; that there are times when they want to rise and wave handkerchiefs and shout their approbation, and times when tears are running down their faces, and it would be a relief to free their pent emotions in sobs or screams; yet you hear not one utterance till the curtain swings together and the closing strains have slowly faded out and died; then the dead rise with one impulse and shake the building with their applause. Every seat is full in the first act; there is not a vacant one in the last. If a man would be conspicuous, let him come here and retire from the house in the midst of an act. It would make him celebrated.
This audience reminds me of nothing I have ever seen and of nothing I have read about except the city in the Arabian tale where all the inhabitants have been turned to brass and the traveler finds them after centuries mute, motionless, and still retaining the attitudes which they last knew in life. Here the Wagner audience dress as they please, and sit in the dark and worship in silence. At the Metropolitan in New York they sit in a glare, and wear their showiest harness; they hum airs, they squeak fans, they titter, and they gabble all the time. In some of the boxes the conversation and laughter are so loud as to divide the attention of the house with the stage. In large measure the Metropolitan is a show-case for rich fashionables who are not trained in Wagnerian music and have no reverence for it, but who like to promote art and show their clothes.
Can that be an agreeable atmosphere to persons in whom this music produces a sort of divine ecstasy and to whom its creator is a very deity, his stage a temple, the works of his brain and hands consecrated things, and the partaking of them with eye and ear a sacred solemnity? Manifestly, no. Then, perhaps the temporary expatriation, the tedious traversing of seas and continents, the pilgrimage to Bayreuth stands explained. These devotees would worship in an atmosphere of devotion. It is only here that they can find it without fleck or blemish or any worldly pollution. In this remote village there are no sights to see, there is no newspaper to intrude the worries of the distant world, there is nothing going on, it is always Sunday. The pilgrim wends to his temple out of town, sits out his moving service, returns to his bed with his heart and soul and his body exhausted by long hours of tremendous emotion, and he is in no fit condition to do anything but to lie torpid and slowly gather back life and strength for the next service. This opera of “Tristan and Isolde” last night broke the hearts of all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some who have heard of many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.
But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that this is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I have never seen anything like this before. I have never seen anything so great and fine and real as this devotion.
FRIDAY.–Yesterday’s opera was “Parsifal” again. The others went and they show marked advance in appreciation; but I went hunting for relics and reminders of the Margravine Wilhelmina, she of the imperishable “Memoirs.” I am properly grateful to her for her (unconscious) satire upon monarchy and nobility, and therefore nothing which her hand touched or her eye looked upon is indifferent to me. I am her pilgrim; the rest of this multitude here are Wagner’s.
TUESDAY.–I have seen my last two operas; my season is ended, and we cross over into Bohemia this afternoon. I was supposing that my musical regeneration was accomplished and perfected, because I enjoyed both of these operas, singing and all, and, moreover, one of them was “Parsifal,” but the experts have disenchanted me. They say:
“Singing! That wasn’t singing; that was the wailing, screeching of third-rate obscurities, palmed off on us in the interest of economy.”
Well, I ought to have recognized the sign–the old, sure sign that has never failed me in matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it means that it is mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo. However, my base instinct does bring me profit sometimes; I was the only man out of thirty-two hundred who got his money back on those two operas.
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Is it true that the sun of a man’s mentality touches noon at forty and then begins to wane toward setting? Doctor Osler is charged with saying so. Maybe he said it, maybe he didn’t; I don’t know which it is. But if he said it, I can point him to a case which proves his rule. Proves it by being an exception to it. To this place I nominate Mr. Howells.
I read his VENETIAN DAYS about forty years ago. I compare it with his paper on Machiavelli in a late number of HARPER, and I cannot find that his English has suffered any impairment. For forty years his English has been to me a continual delight and astonishment. In the sustained exhibition of certain great qualities–clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing–he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English-writing world. SUSTAINED. I entrench myself behind that protecting word. There are others who exhibit those great qualities as greatly as he does, but only by intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of veiled and dimmer landscape between; whereas Howells’s moon sails cloudless skies all night and all the nights.
In the matter of verbal exactness Mr. Howells has no superior, I suppose. He seems to be almost always able to find that elusive and shifty grain of gold, the RIGHT WORD. Others have to put up with approximations, more or less frequently; he has better luck. To me, the others are miners working with the gold-pan–of necessity some of the gold washes over and escapes; whereas, in my fancy, he is quicksilver raiding down a riffle–no grain of the metal stands much chance of eluding him. A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader’s way and makes it plain; a close approximation to it will answer, and much traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do not welcome it and applaud it and rejoice in it as we do when THE right one blazes out on us. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt: it tingles exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn-butter that creams the sumac-berry. One has no time to examine the word and vote upon its rank and standing, the automatic recognition of its supremacy is so immediate. There is a plenty of acceptable literature which deals largely in approximations, but it may be likened to a fine landscape seen through the rain; the right word would dismiss the rain, then you would see it better. It doesn’t rain when Howells is at work.
And where does he get the easy and effortless flow of his speech? and its cadenced and undulating rhythm? and its architectural felicities of construction, its graces of expression, its pemmican quality of compression, and all that? Born to him, no doubt. All in shining good order in the beginning, all extraordinary; and all just as shining, just as extraordinary today, after forty years of diligent wear and tear and use. He passed his fortieth year long and long ago; but I think his English of today–his perfect English, I wish to say– can throw down the glove before his English of that antique time and not be afraid.
I will got back to the paper on Machiavelli now, and ask the reader to examine this passage from it which I append. I do not mean examine it in a bird’s-eye way; I mean search it, study it. And, of course, read it aloud. I may be wrong, still it is my conviction that one cannot get out of finely wrought literature all that is in it by reading it mutely:
Mr. Dyer is rather of the opinion, first luminously suggested by Macaulay, that Machiavelli was in earnest, but must not be judged as a political moralist of our time and race would be judged. He thinks that Machiavelli was in earnest, as none but an idealist can be, and he is the first to imagine him an idealist immersed in realities, who involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into something like the visionary issues of reverie. The Machiavelli whom he depicts does not cease to be politically a republican and socially a just man because he holds up an atrocious despot like Caesar Borgia as a mirror for rulers. What Machiavelli beheld round him in Italy was a civic disorder in which there was oppression without statecraft, and revolt without patriotism. When a miscreant like Borgia appeared upon the scene and reduced both tyrants and rebels to an apparent quiescence, he might very well seem to such a dreamer the savior of society whom a certain sort of dreamers are always looking for. Machiavelli was no less honest when he honored the diabolical force than Carlyle was when at different times he extolled the strong man who destroys liberty in creating order. But Carlyle has only just ceased to be mistaken for a reformer, while it is still Machiavelli’s hard fate to be so trammeled in his material that his name stands for whatever is most malevolent and perfidious in human nature.
You see how easy and flowing it is; how unvexed by ruggednesses, clumsinesses, broken meters; how simple and–so far as you or I can make out–unstudied; how clear, how limpid, how understandable, how unconfused by cross-currents, eddies, undertows; how seemingly unadorned, yet is all adornment, like the lily-of-the-valley; and how compressed, how compact, without a complacency-signal hung out anywhere to call attention to it.
There are twenty-three lines in the quoted passage. After reading it several times aloud, one perceives that a good deal of matter is crowded into that small space. I think it is a model of compactness. When I take its materials apart and work them over and put them together in my way, I find I cannot crowd the result back into the same hole, there not being room enough. I find it a case of a woman packing a man’s trunk: he can get the things out, but he can’t ever get them back again.
The proffered paragraph is a just and fair sample; the rest of the article is as compact as it is; there are no waste words. The sample is just in other ways: limpid, fluent, graceful, and rhythmical as it is, it holds no superiority in these respects over the rest of the essay. Also, the choice phrasing noticeable in the sample is not lonely; there is a plenty of its kin distributed through the other paragraphs. This is claiming much when that kin must face the challenge of a phrase like the one in the middle sentence: “an idealist immersed in realities who involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into something like the visionary issues of reverie.” With a hundred words to do it with, the literary artisan could catch that airy thought and tie it down and reduce it to a concrete condition, visible, substantial, understandable and all right, like a cabbage; but the artist does it with twenty, and the result is a flower.
The quoted phrase, like a thousand others that have come from the same source, has the quality of certain scraps of verse which take hold of us and stay in our memories, we do not understand why, at first: all the words being the right words, none of them is conspicuous, and so they all seem inconspicuous, therefore we wonder what it is about them that makes their message take hold.
The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom,
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.
It is like a dreamy strain of moving music, with no sharp notes in it. The words are all “right” words, and all the same size. We do not notice it at first. We get the effect, it goes straight home to us, but we do not know why. It is when the right words are conspicuous that they thunder:
The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome!
When I got back from Howells old to Howells young I find him arranging and clustering English words well, but not any better than now. He is not more felicitous in concreting abstractions now than he was in translating, then, the visions of the eyes of flesh into words that reproduced their forms and colors:
In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest. It is at once shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked FACCHINI; and now in St. Mark’s Place the music of innumerable shovels smote upon my ear; and I saw the shivering legion of poverty as it engaged the elements in a struggle for the possession of the Piazza. But the snow continued to fall, and through the twilight of the descending flakes all this toil and encountered looked like that weary kind of effort in dreams, when the most determined industry seems only to renew the task. The lofty crest of the bell-tower was hidden in the folds of falling snow, and I could no longer see the golden angel upon its summit. But looked at across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of St. Mark’s Church was perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting threads of the snowfall were woven into a spell of novel enchantment around the structure that always seemed to me too exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be anything but the creation of magic. The tender snow had compassionated the beautiful edifice for all the wrongs of time, and so hid the stains and ugliness of decay that it looked as if just from the hand of the builder–or, better said, just from the brain of the architect. There was marvelous freshness in the colors of the mosaics in the great arches of the facade, and all that gracious harmony into which the temple rises, or marble scrolls and leafy exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was a hundred times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the drifting flakes. The snow lay lightly on the golden gloves that tremble like peacocks-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest white; it robed the saints in ermine; and it danced over all its works, as if exulting in its beauty–beauty which filled me with subtle, selfish yearning to keep such evanescent loveliness for the little-while-longer of my whole life, and with despair to think that even the poor lifeless shadow of it could never be fairly reflected in picture or poem.
Through the wavering snowfall, the Saint Theodore upon one of the granite pillars of the Piazzetta did not show so grim as his wont is, and the winged lion on the other might have been a winged lamb, so gentle and mild he looked by the tender light of the storm. The towers of the island churches loomed faint and far away in the dimness; the sailors in the rigging of the ships that lay in the Basin wrought like phantoms among the shrouds; the gondolas stole in and out of the opaque distance more noiselessly and dreamily than ever; and a silence, almost palpable, lay upon the mutest city in the world.
The spirit of Venice is there: of a city where Age and Decay, fagged with distributing damage and repulsiveness among the other cities of the planet in accordance with the policy and business of their profession, come for rest and play between seasons, and treat themselves to the luxury and relaxation of sinking the shop and inventing and squandering charms all about, instead of abolishing such as they find, as it their habit when not on vacation.
In the working season they do business in Boston sometimes, and a character in THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY takes accurate note of pathetic effects wrought by them upon the aspects of a street of once dignified and elegant homes whose occupants have moved away and left them a prey to neglect and gradual ruin and progressive degradation; a descent which reaches bottom at last, when the street becomes a roost for humble professionals of the faith-cure and fortune-telling sort.
What a queer, melancholy house, what a queer, melancholy street! I don’t think I was ever in a street before when quite so many professional ladies, with English surnames, preferred Madam to Mrs. on their door-plates. And the poor old place has such a desperately conscious air of going to the deuce. Every house seems to wince as you go by, and button itself up to the chin for fear you should find out it had no shirt on–so to speak. I don’t know what’s the reason, but these material tokens of a social decay afflict me terribly; a tipsy woman isn’t dreadfuler than a haggard old house, that’s once been a home, in a street like this.
Mr. Howells’s pictures are not mere stiff, hard, accurate photographs; they are photographs with feeling in them, and sentiment, photographs taken in a dream, one might say.
As concerns his humor, I will not try to say anything, yet I would try, if I had the words that might approximately reach up to its high place. I do not think any one else can play with humorous fancies so gracefully and delicately and deliciously as he does, nor has so many to play with, nor can come so near making them look as if they were doing the playing themselves and he was not aware that they were at it. For they are unobtrusive, and quiet in their ways, and well conducted. His is a humor which flows softly all around about and over and through the mesh of the page, pervasive, refreshing, health-giving, and makes no more show and no more noise than does the circulation of the blood.
There is another thing which is contentingly noticeable in Mr. Howells’s books. That is his “stage directions”–those artifices which authors employ to throw a kind of human naturalness around a scene and a conversation, and help the reader to see the one and get at meanings in the other which might not be perceived if entrusted unexplained to the bare words of the talk. Some authors overdo the stage directions, they elaborate them quite beyond necessity; they spend so much time and take up so much room in telling us how a person said a thing and how he looked and acted when he said it that we get tired and vexed and wish he hadn’t said it all. Other authors’ directions are brief enough, but it is seldom that the brevity contains either wit or information. Writers of this school go in rags, in the matter of state directions; the majority of them having nothing in stock but a cigar, a laugh, a blush, and a bursting into tears. In their poverty they work these sorry things to the bone. They say:
“. . . replied Alfred, flipping the ash from his cigar.” (This explains nothing; it only wastes space.)
“. . . responded Richard, with a laugh.” (There was nothing to laugh about; there never is. The writer puts it in from habit–automatically; he is paying no attention to his work; or he would see that there is nothing to laugh at; often, when a remark is unusually and poignantly flat and silly, he tries to deceive the reader by enlarging the stage direction and making Richard break into “frenzies of uncontrollable laughter.” This makes the reader sad.)
“. . . murmured Gladys, blushing.” (This poor old shop-worn blush is a tiresome thing. We get so we would rather Gladys would fall out of the book and break her neck than do it again. She is always doing it, and usually irrelevantly. Whenever it is her turn to murmur she hangs out her blush; it is the only thing she’s got. In a little while we hate her, just as we do Richard.)
“. . . repeated Evelyn, bursting into tears.” (This kind keep a book damp all the time. They can’t say a thing without crying. They cry so much about nothing that by and by when they have something to cry ABOUT they have gone dry; they sob, and fetch nothing; we are not moved. We are only glad.)
They gavel me, these stale and overworked stage directions, these carbon films that got burnt out long ago and cannot now carry any faintest thread of light. It would be well if they could be relieved from duty and flung out in the literary back yard to rot and disappear along with the discarded and forgotten “steeds” and “halidomes” and similar stage-properties once so dear to our grandfathers. But I am friendly to Mr. Howells’s stage directions; more friendly to them than to any one else’s, I think. They are done with a competent and discriminating art, and are faithful to the requirements of a state direction’s proper and lawful office, which is to inform. Sometimes they convey a scene and its conditions so well that I believe I could see the scene and get the spirit and meaning of the accompanying dialogue if some one would read merely the stage directions to me and leave out the talk. For instance, a scene like this, from THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY:
“. . . and she laid her arms with a beseeching gesture on her father’s shoulder.”
“. . . she answered, following his gesture with a glance.”
“. . . she said, laughing nervously.”
“. . . she asked, turning swiftly upon him that strange, searching glance.”
“. . . she answered, vaguely.”
“. . . she reluctantly admitted.”
“. . . but her voice died wearily away, and she stood looking into his face with puzzled entreaty.”
Mr. Howells does not repeat his forms, and does not need to; he can invent fresh ones without limit. It is mainly the repetition over and over again, by the third-rates, of worn and commonplace and juiceless forms that makes their novels such a weariness and vexation to us, I think. We do not mind one or two deliveries of their wares, but as we turn the pages over and keep on meeting them we presently get tired of them and wish they would do other things for a change.
“. . . replied Alfred, flipping the ash from his cigar.”
“. . . responded Richard, with a laugh.”
“. . . murmured Gladys, blushing.”
“. . . repeated Evelyn, bursting into tears.”
“. . . replied the Earl, flipping the ash from his cigar.”
“. . . responded the undertaker, with a laugh.”
“. . . murmured the chambermaid, blushing.”
“. . . repeated the burglar, bursting into tears.”
“. . . replied the conductor, flipping the ash from his cigar.”
“. . . responded Arkwright, with a laugh.”
“. . . murmured the chief of police, blushing.”
“. . . repeated the house-cat, bursting into tears.”
And so on and so on; till at last it ceases to excite. I always notice stage directions, because they fret me and keep me trying to get out of their way, just as the automobiles do. At first; then by and by they become monotonous and I get run over.
Mr. Howells has done much work, and the spirit of it is as beautiful as the make of it. I have held him in admiration and affection so many years that I know by the number of those years that he is old now; but his heart isn’t, nor his pen; and years do not count. Let him have plenty of them; there is profit in them for us.
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ENGLISH AS SHE IS TAUGHT
In the appendix to Croker’s Boswell’s Johnson one finds this anecdote:
CATO’S SOLILOQUY.–One day Mrs. Gastrel set a little girl to repeat to him [Dr. Samuel Johnson] Cato’s Soliloquy, which she went through very correctly. The Doctor, after a pause, asked the child:
“What was to bring Cato to an end?”
She said it was a knife.
“No, my dear, it was not so.”
“My aunt Polly said it was a knife.”
“Why, Aunt Polly’s knife MAY DO, but it was a DAGGER, my dear.”
He then asked her the meaning of “bane and antidote,” which she was unable to give. Mrs. Gastrel said:
“You cannot expect so young a child to know the meaning of such words.”
He then said:
“My dear, how many pence are there in SIXPENCE?”
“I cannot tell, sir,” was the half-terrified reply.
On this, addressing himself to Mrs. Gastrel, he said:
“Now, my dear lady, can anything be more ridiculous than to teach a child Cato’s Soliloquy, who does not know how many pence there are in a sixpence?”
In a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society Professor Ravenstein quoted the following list of frantic questions, and said that they had been asked in an examination:
Mention all names of places in the world derived from Julius Caesar or Augustus Caesar.
Where are the following rivers: Pisuerga, Sakaria, Guadalete, Jalon, Mulde?
All you know of the following: Machacha, Pilmo, Schebulos, Crivoscia, Basces, Mancikert, Taxhem, Citeaux, Meloria, Zutphen.
The highest peaks of the Karakorum range.
The number of universities in Prussia.
Why are the tops of mountains continually covered with snow [sic]?
Name the length and breadth of the streams of lava which issued from the Skaptar Jokul in the eruption of 1783.
That list would oversize nearly anybody’s geographical knowledge. Isn’t it reasonably possible that in our schools many of the questions in all studies are several miles ahead of where the pupil is?–that he is set to struggle with things that are ludicrously beyond his present reach, hopelessly beyond his present strength? This remark in passing, and by way of text; now I come to what I was going to say.
I have just now fallen upon a darling literary curiosity. It is a little book, a manuscript compilation, and the compiler sent it to me with the request that I say whether I think it ought to be published or not. I said, Yes; but as I slowly grow wise I briskly grow cautious; and so, now that the publication is imminent, it has seemed to me that I should feel more comfortable if I could divide up this responsibility with the public by adding them to the court. Therefore I will print some extracts from the book, in the hope that they may make converts to my judgment that the volume has merit which entitles it to publication.
As to its character. Every one has sampled “English as She is Spoke” and “English as She is Wrote”; this little volume furnishes us an instructive array of examples of “English as She is Taught”–in the public schools of–well, this country. The collection is made by a teacher in those schools, and all the examples in it are genuine; none of them have been tampered with, or doctored in any way. From time to time, during several years, whenever a pupil has delivered himself of anything peculiarly quaint or toothsome in the course of his recitations, this teacher and her associates have privately set that thing down in a memorandum-book; strictly following the original, as to grammar, construction, spelling, and all; and the result is this literary curiosity.
The contents of the book consist mainly of answers given by the boys and girls to questions, said answers being given sometimes verbally, sometimes in writing. The subjects touched upon are fifteen in number: I. Etymology; II. Grammar; III. Mathematics; IV. Geography; V. “Original”; VI. Analysis; VII. History; VIII. “Intellectual”; IX. Philosophy; X. Physiology; XI. Astronomy; XII. Politics; XIII. Music; XIV. Oratory; XV. Metaphysics.
You perceive that the poor little young idea has taken a shot at a good many kinds of game in the course of the book. Now as to results. Here are some quaint definitions of words. It will be noticed that in all of these instances the sound of the word, or the look of it on paper, has misled the child:
ABORIGINES, a system of mountains.
ALIAS, a good man in the Bible.
AMENABLE, anything that is mean.
AMMONIA, the food of the gods.
ASSIDUITY, state of being an acid.
AURIFEROUS, pertaining to an orifice.
CAPILLARY, a little caterpillar.
CORNIFEROUS, rocks in which fossil corn is found.
EMOLUMENT, a headstone to a grave.
EQUESTRIAN, one who asks questions.
EUCHARIST, one who plays euchre.
FRANCHISE, anything belonging to the French.
IDOLATER, a very idle person.
IPECAC, a man who likes a good dinner.
IRRIGATE, to make fun of.
MENDACIOUS, what can be mended.
MERCENARY, one who feels for another.
PARASITE, a kind of umbrella.
PARASITE, the murder of an infant.
PUBLICAN, a man who does his prayers in public.
TENACIOUS, ten acres of land.
Here is one where the phrase “publicans and sinners” has got mixed up in the child’s mind with politics, and the result is a definition which takes one in a sudden and unexpected way:
REPUBLICAN, a sinner mentioned in the Bible.
Also in Democratic newspapers now and then. Here are two where the mistake has resulted from sound assisted by remote fact:
PLAGIARIST, a writer of plays.
DEMAGOGUE, a vessel containing beer and other liquids.
I cannot quite make out what it was that misled the pupil in the following instances; it would not seem to have been the sound of the word, nor the look of it in print:
ASPHYXIA, a grumbling, fussy temper.
QUARTERNIONS, a bird with a flat beak and no bill, living in New Zealand.
QUARTERNIONS, the name given to a style of art practiced by the Phoenicians.
QUARTERNIONS, a religious convention held every hundred years.
SIBILANT, the state of being idiotic.
CROSIER, a staff carried by the Deity.
In the following sentences the pupil’s ear has been deceiving him again:
The marriage was illegible.
He was totally dismasted with the whole performance.
He enjoys riding on a philosopher.
She was very quick at repertoire.
He prayed for the waters to subsidize.
The leopard is watching his sheep.
They had a strawberry vestibule.
Here is one which–well, now, how often we do slam right into the truth without ever suspecting it:
The men employed by the Gas Company go around and speculate the meter.
Indeed they do, dear; and when you grow up, many and many’s the time you will notice it in the gas bill. In the following sentences the little people have some information to convey, every time; but in my case they fail to connect: the light always went out on the keystone word:
The coercion of some things is remarkable; as bread and molasses.
Her hat is contiguous because she wears it on one side.
He preached to an egregious congregation.
The captain eliminated a bullet through the man’s heart.
You should take caution and be precarious.
The supercilious girl acted with vicissitude when the perennial time came.
The last is a curiously plausible sentence; one seems to know what it means, and yet he knows all the time that he doesn’t. Here is an odd (but entirely proper) use of a word, and a most sudden descent from a lofty philosophical altitude to a very practical and homely illustration:
We should endeavor to avoid extremes–like those of wasps and bees.
And here–with “zoological” and “geological” in his mind, but not ready to his tongue–the small scholar has innocently gone and let out a couple of secrets which ought never to have been divulged in any circumstances:
There are a good many donkeys in theological gardens.
Some of the best fossils are found in theological gardens.
Under the head of “Grammar” the little scholars furnish the following information:
Gender is the distinguishing nouns without regard to sex.
A verb is something to eat.
Adverbs should always be used as adjectives and adjectives as adverbs.
Every sentence and name of God must begin with a caterpillar.
“Caterpillar” is well enough, but capital letter would have been stricter. The following is a brave attempt at a solution, but it failed to liquify:
When they are going to say some prose or poetry before they say the poetry or prose they must put a semicolon just after the introduction of the prose or poetry.
The chapter on “Mathematics” is full of fruit. From it I take a few samples–mainly in an unripe state:
A straight line is any distance between two places.
Parallel lines are lines that can never meet until they run together.
A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.
Things which are equal to each other are equal to anything else.
To find the number of square feet in a room you multiply the room by the number of the feet. The product is the result.
Right you are. In the matter of geography this little book is unspeakably rich. The questions do not appear to have applied the microscope to the subject, as did those quoted by Professor Ravenstein; still, they proved plenty difficult enough without that. These pupils did not hunt with a microscope, they hunted with a shot-gun; this is shown by the crippled condition of the game they brought in:
America is divided into the Passiffic slope and the Mississippi valey.
North America is separated by Spain.
America consists from north to south about five hundred miles.
The United States is quite a small country compared with some other countrys, but it about as industrious.
The capital of the United States is Long Island.
The five seaports of the U.S. are Newfunlan and Sanfrancisco.
The principal products of the U.S. is earthquakes and volcanoes.
The Alaginnies are mountains in Philadelphia.
The Rocky Mountains are on the western side of Philadelphia.
Cape Hateras is a vast body of water surrounded by land and flowing into the Gulf of Mexico.
Mason and Dixon’s line is the Equator.
One of the leading industries of the United States is mollasses, book-covers, numbers, gas, teaching, lumber, manufacturers, paper-making, publishers, coal.
In Austria the principal occupation is gathering Austrich feathers.
Gibraltar is an island built on a rock.
Russia is very cold and tyrannical.
Sicily is one of the Sandwich Islands.
Hindoostan flows through the Ganges and empties into the Mediterranean Sea.
Ireland is called the Emigrant Isle because it is so beautiful and green.
The width of the different zones Europe lies in depend upon the surrounding country.
The imports of a country are the things that are paid for, the exports are the things that are not.
Climate lasts all the time and weather only a few days.
The two most famous volcanoes of Europe are Sodom and Gomorrah.
The chapter headed “Analysis” shows us that the pupils in our public schools are not merely loaded up with those showy facts about geography, mathematics, and so on, and left in that incomplete state; no, there’s machinery for clarifying and expanding their minds. They are required to take poems and analyze them, dig out their common sense, reduce them to statistics, and reproduce them in a luminous prose translation which shall tell you at a glance what the poet was trying to get at. One sample will do. Here is a stanza from “The Lady of the Lake,” followed by the pupil’s impressive explanation of it:
Alone, but with unbated zeal,
The horseman plied with scourge and steel; For jaded now and spent with toil,
Embossed with foam and dark with soil, While every gasp with sobs he drew,
The laboring stag strained full in view.
The man who rode on the horse performed the whip and an instrument made of steel alone with strong ardor not diminishing, for, being tired from the time passed with hard labor overworked with anger and ignorant with weariness, while every breath for labor he drew with cries full or sorrow, the young deer made imperfect who worked hard filtered in sight.
I see, now, that I never understood that poem before. I have had glimpses of its meaning, it moments when I was not as ignorant with weariness as usual, but this is the first time the whole spacious idea of it ever filtered in sight. If I were a public-school pupil I would put those other studies aside and stick to analysis; for, after all, it is the thing to spread your mind.
We come now to historical matters, historical remains, one might say. As one turns the pages he is impressed with the depth to which one date has been driven into the American child’s head –1492. The date is there, and it is there to stay. And it is always at hand, always deliverable at a moment’s notice. But the Fact that belongs with it? That is quite another matter. Only the date itself is familiar and sure: its vast Fact has failed of lodgment. It would appear that whenever you ask a public- school pupil when a thing–anything, no matter what–happened, and he is in doubt, he always rips out his 1492. He applies it to everything, from the landing of the ark to the introduction of the horse-car. Well, after all, it is our first date, and so it is right enough to honor it, and pay the public schools to teach our children to honor it:
George Washington was born in 1492.
Washington wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1492.
St. Bartholemew was massacred in 1492.
The Brittains were the Saxons who entered England in 1492 under Julius Caesar.
The earth is 1492 miles in circumference.
To proceed with “History”
Christopher Columbus was called the Father of his Country.
Queen Isabella of Spain sold her watch and chain and other millinery so that Columbus could discover America.
The Indian wars were very desecrating to the country.
The Indians pursued their warfare by hiding in the bushes and then scalping them.
Captain John Smith has been styled the father of his country. His life was saved by his daughter Pochahantas.
The Puritans found an insane asylum in the wilds of America.
The Stamp Act was to make everybody stamp all materials so they should be null and void.
Washington died in Spain almost broken-hearted. His remains were taken to the cathedral in Havana.
Gorilla warfare was where men rode on gorillas.
John Brown was a very good insane man who tried to get fugitives slaves into Virginia. He captured all the inhabitants, but was finally conquered and condemned to his death. The confederasy was formed by the fugitive slaves.
Alfred the Great reigned 872 years. He was distinguished for letting some buckwheat cakes burn, and the lady scolded him.
Henry Eight was famous for being a great widower haveing lost several wives.
Lady Jane Grey studied Greek and Latin and was beheaded after a few days.
John Bright is noted for an incurable disease.
Lord James Gordon Bennet instigated the Gordon Riots.
The Middle Ages come in between antiquity and posterity.
Luther introduced Christianity into England a good many thousand years ago. His birthday was November 1883. He was once a Pope. He lived at the time of the Rebellion of Worms.
Julius Caesar is noted for his famous telegram dispatch I came I saw I conquered.
Julius Caesar was really a very great man. He was a very great soldier and wrote a book for beginners in the Latin.
Cleopatra was caused by the death of an asp which she dissolved in a wine cup.
The only form of government in Greece was a limited monkey.
The Persian war lasted about 500 years.
Greece had only 7 wise men.
Socrates . . . destroyed some statues and had to drink Shamrock.
Here is a fact correctly stated; and yet it is phrased with such ingenious infelicity that it can be depended upon to convey misinformation every time it is uncarefully unread:
By the Salic law no woman or descendant of a woman could occupy the throne.
To show how far a child can travel in history with judicious and diligent boosting in the public school, we select the following mosaic:
Abraham Lincoln was born in Wales in 1599.
In the chapter headed “Intellectual” I find a great number of most interesting statements. A sample or two may be found not amiss:
Bracebridge Hall was written by Henry Irving.
Show Bound was written by Peter Cooper.
The House of the Seven Gables was written by Lord Bryant.
Edgar A. Poe was a very curdling writer.
Cotton Mather was a writer who invented the cotten gin and wrote histories.
Beowulf wrote the Scriptures.
Ben Johnson survived Shakspeare in some respects.
In the Canterbury Tale it gives account of King Alfred on his way to the shrine of Thomas Bucket.
Chaucer was the father of English pottery.
Chaucer was a bland verse writer of the third century.
Chaucer was succeeded by H. Wads. Longfellow an American Writer. His writings were chiefly prose and nearly one hundred years elapsed.
Shakspere translated the Scriptures and it was called St. James because he did it.
In the middle of the chapter I find many pages of information concerning Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s works, and those of Bacon, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, De Foe, Locke, Pope, Swift, Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge, Hood, Scott, Macaulay, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, Browning, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and Disraeli–a fact which shows that into the restricted stomach of the public-school pupil is shoveled every year the blood, bone, and viscera of a gigantic literature, and the same is there digested and disposed of in a most successful and characteristic and gratifying public-school way. I have space for but a trifling few of the results:
Lord Byron was the son of an heiress and a drunken man.
Wm. Wordsworth wrote the Barefoot Boy and Imitations on Immortality.
Gibbon wrote a history of his travels in Italy. This was original.
George Eliot left a wife and children who mourned greatly for his genius.
George Eliot Miss Mary Evans Mrs. Cross Mrs. Lewis was the greatest female poet unless George Sands is made an exception of.
Bulwell is considered a good writer.
Sir Walter Scott Charles Bronte Alfred the Great and Johnson were the first great novelists.
Thomas Babington Makorlay graduated at Harvard and then studied law, he was raised to the peerage as baron in 1557 and died in 1776.
Here are two or three miscellaneous facts that may be of value, if taken in moderation:
Homer’s writings are Homer’s Essays Virgil the Aenid and Paradise lost some people say that these poems were not written by Homer but by another man of the same name.
A sort of sadness kind of shone in Bryant’s poems.
Holmes is a very profligate and amusing writer.
When the public-school pupil wrestles with the political features of the Great Republic, they throw him sometimes:
A bill becomes a law when the President vetoes it.
The three departments of the government is the President rules the world, the governor rules the State, the mayor rules the city.
The first conscientious Congress met in Philadelphia.
The Constitution of the United States was established to ensure domestic hostility.
Truth crushed to earth will rise again. As follows:
The Constitution of the United States is that part of the book at the end which nobody reads.
And here she rises once more and untimely. There should be a limit to public-school instruction; it cannot be wise or well to let the young find out everything:
Congress is divided into civilized half civilized and savage.
Here are some results of study in music and oratory:
An interval in music is the distance on the keyboard from one piano to the next.
A rest means you are not to sing it.
Emphasis is putting more distress on one word than another.
The chapter on “Physiology” contains much that ought not to be lost to science:
Physillogigy is to study about your bones stummick and vertebry.
Occupations which are injurious to health are cabolic acid gas which is impure blood.
We have an upper and lower skin. The lower skin moves all the time and the upper skin moves when we do.
The body is mostly composed of water and about one half is avaricious tissue.
The stomach is a small pear-shaped bone situated in the body.
The gastric juice keeps the bones from creaking.
The Chyle flows up the middle of the backbone and reaches the heart where it meets the oxygen and is purified.
The salivary glands are used to salivate the body.
In the stomach starch is changed to cane sugar and cane sugar to sugar cane.
The olfactory nerve enters the cavity of the orbit and is developed into the special sense of hearing.
The growth of a tooth begins in the back of the mouth and extends to the stomach.
If we were on a railroad track and a train was coming the train would deafen our ears so that we couldn’t see to get off the track.
If, up to this point, none of my quotations have added flavor to the Johnsonian anecdote at the head of this article, let us make another attempt:
The theory that intuitive truths are discovered by the light of nature originated from St. John’s interpretation of a passage in the Gospel of Plato.
The weight of the earth is found by comparing a mass of known lead with that of a mass of unknown lead.
To find the weight of the earth take the length of a degree on a meridian and multiply by 6 1/2 pounds.
The spheres are to each other as the squares of their homologous sides.
A body will go just as far in the first second as the body will go plus the force of gravity and that’s equal to twice what the body will go.
Specific gravity is the weight to be compared weight of an equal volume of or that is the weight of a body compared with the weight of an equal volume.
The law of fluid pressure divide the different forms of organized bodies by the form of attraction and the number increased will be the form.
Inertia is that property of bodies by virtue of which it cannot change its own condition of rest or motion. In other words it is the negative quality of passiveness either in recoverable latency or insipient latescence.
If a laugh is fair here, not the struggling child, nor the unintelligent teacher–or rather the unintelligent Boards, Committees, and Trustees–are the proper target for it. All through this little book one detects the signs of a certain probable fact–that a large part of the pupil’s “instruction” consists in cramming him with obscure and wordy “rules” which he does not understand and has no time to understand. It would be as useful to cram him with brickbats; they would at least stay. In a town in the interior of New York, a few years ago, a gentleman set forth a mathematical problem and proposed to give a prize to every public-school pupil who should furnish the correct solution of it. Twenty-two of the brightest boys in the public schools entered the contest. The problem was not a very difficult one for pupils of their mathematical rank and standing, yet they all failed–by a hair–through one trifling mistake or another. Some searching questions were asked, when it turned out that these lads were as glib as parrots with the “rules,” but could not reason out a single rule or explain the principle underlying it. Their memories had been stocked, but not their understandings. It was a case of brickbat culture, pure and simple.
There are several curious “compositions” in the little book, and we must make room for one. It is full of naivete, brutal truth, and unembarrassed directness, and is the funniest (genuine) boy’s composition I think I have ever seen: