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The Ways of Men

by Eliot Gregory · English · Gutenberg #319 · 394,386 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Ways of Men

Author: Eliot Gregory


        
Release date: August 1, 1995 [eBook #319]
                Most recently updated: August 10, 2008

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/319

Credits: Transcribed from the 1900 Charles Scribner’s sons edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WAYS OF MEN ***


Transcribed from the 1900 Charles Scribner’s sons edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org





THE WAYS OF MEN


                                    by
                              Eliot Gregory
                              (“_An Idler_”)
                 _Author of_ “_Worldly Ways and Byways_.”

                                 NEW YORK
                         Charles Scribner’s Sons
                                   MCM

             _Copyright_, 1900, _by Charles Scribner’s Sons_

             _D. B. Updike_, _The Merrymount Press_, _Boston_




TO
Edith Wharton


    “I have not lacked thy mild reproof,
    Nor golden largess of thy praise.”




CHAPTER 1—“_Uncle Sam_”


The gentleman who graced the gubernatorial armchair of our state when
this century was born happened to be an admirer of classic lore and the
sonorous names of antiquity.

It is owing to his weakness in bestowing pompous cognomens on our embryo
towns and villages that to-day names like Utica, Syracuse, and Ithaca,
instead of evoking visions of historic pomp and circumstance, raise in
the minds of most Americans the picture of cocky little cities, rich only
in trolley-cars and Methodist meeting-houses.

When, however, this cultured governor, in his ardor, christened one of
the cities Troy, and the hill in its vicinity Mount Ida, he little
dreamed that a youth was living on its slopes whose name was destined to
become a household word the world over, as the synonym for the proudest
and wealthiest republic yet known to history, a sobriquet that would be
familiar in the mouths of races to whose continents even the titles of
Jupiter or Mars had never penetrated.

A little before this century began, two boys with packs bound on their
stalwart shoulders walked from New York and established a brickyard in
the neighborhood of what is now Perry Street, Troy.  Ebenezer and Samuel
Wilson soon became esteemed citizens of the infant city, their kindliness
and benevolence winning for them the affection and respect of the
community.

The younger brother, Samuel, was an especial favorite with the children
of the place, whose explorations into his deep pockets were generally
rewarded by the discovery of some simple “sweet” or home-made toy.  The
slender youth with the “nutcracker” face proving to be the merriest of
playfellows, in their love his little band of admirers gave him the pet
name of “Uncle Sam,” by which he quickly became known, to the exclusion
of his real name.  This is the kindly and humble origin of a title the
mere speaking of which to-day quickens the pulse and moistens the eyes of
millions of Americans with the same thrill that the dear old flag arouses
when we catch sight of it, especially an unexpected glimpse in some
foreign land.

With increasing wealth the brickyard of the Wilson brothers was replaced
by an extensive slaughtering business, in which more than a hundred men
were soon employed—a vast establishment for that day, killing weekly some
thousand head of cattle.  During the military operations of 1812 the
brothers signed a contract to furnish the troops at Greenbush with meat,
“packed in full bound barrels of white oak”; soon after, Samuel was
appointed Inspector of Provisions for the army.

It is a curious coincidence that England also should have taken an
ex-army-contractor as her patron saint, for if we are to believe
tradition, St. George of Cappadocia filled that position unsatisfactorily
before he passed through martyrdom to sainthood.

True prototype of the nation that was later to adopt him as its
godfather, the shrewd and honest patriot, “Uncle Sam,” not only lived
loyally up to his contracts, giving full measure and of his best, but
proved himself incorruptible, making it his business to see that others
too fulfilled their engagements both in the letter and the spirit; so
that the “U.S.” (abbreviation of United States) which he pencilled on all
provisions that had passed his inspection became in the eyes of officers
and soldiers a guarantee of excellence.  Samuel’s old friends, the boys
of Troy (now enlisted in the army), naïvely imagining that the mystic
initials were an allusion to the pet name they had given him years
before, would accept no meats but “Uncle Sam’s,” murmuring if other
viands were offered them.  Their comrades without inquiry followed this
example; until so strong did the prejudice for food marked “U.S.” become,
that other contractors, in order that their provisions should find favor
with the soldiers, took to announcing “Uncle Sam” brands.

To the greater part of the troops, ignorant (as are most Americans
to-day) of the real origin of this pseudonym, “Uncle Sam’s” beef and
bread meant merely government provisions, and the step from national
belongings to an impersonation of our country by an ideal “Uncle Sam” was
but a logical sequence.

In his vigorous old age, Samuel Wilson again lived on Mount Ida, near the
estates of the Warren family, where as children we were taken to visit
his house and hear anecdotes of the aged patriot’s hospitality and humor.
The honor in which he was held by the country-side, the influence for
good he exerted, and the informal tribunal he held, to which his
neighbors came to get their differences straightened out by his common
sense, are still talked of by the older inhabitants.  One story in
particular used to charm our boyish ears.  It was about a dispute over
land between the Livingstons and the Van Rensselaers, which was brought
to an end by “Uncle Sam’s” producing a barrel of old papers (confided to
him by both families during the war, for safe keeping) and extracting
from this original “strong box” title deeds to the property in
litigation.

Now, in these troubled times of ours, when rumors of war are again in the
air, one’s thoughts revert with pleasure to the half-mythical figure on
the threshold of the century, and to legends of the clear-eyed giant,
with the quizzical smile and the tender, loyal heart, whose life’s work
makes him a more lovable model and a nobler example to hold up before the
youth of to-day than all the mythological deities that ever disported
themselves on the original Mount Ida.

There is a singular fitness in this choice of “Uncle Sam” as our patron
saint, for to be honest and loyal and modest, to love little children, to
do one’s duty quietly in the heyday of life, and become a mediator in old
age, is to fulfil about the whole duty of man; and every patriotic heart
must wish the analogy may be long maintained, that our loved country,
like its prototype, may continue the protector of the feeble and a
peace-maker among nations.




CHAPTER 2—Domestic Despots


Those who walk through the well-to-do quarters of our city, and glance,
perhaps a little enviously as they pass, toward the cheerful firesides,
do not reflect that in almost every one of these apparently happy homes a
pitiless tyrant reigns, a misshapen monster without bowels of compassion
or thought beyond its own greedy appetites, who sits like Sinbad’s awful
burden on the necks of tender women and distracted men.  Sometimes this
incubus takes the form of a pug, sometimes of a poodle, or simply a
bastard cur admitted to the family bosom in a moment of unreflecting
pity; size and pedigree are of no importance; the result is always the
same.  Once Caliban is installed in his stronghold, peace and
independence desert that roof.

We read daily of fathers tyrannizing over trembling families, of
stepmothers and unnatural children turning what might be happy homes into
amateur Infernos, and sigh, as we think of martyrdoms endured by
overworked animals.

It is cheering to know that societies have been formed for the protection
of dumb brutes and helpless children.  Will no attempt be made to
alleviate this other form of suffering, which has apparently escaped the
eye of the reformer?

The animal kingdom is divided—like all Gaul—into three divisions: wild
beasts, that are obliged to hustle for themselves; laboring and producing
animals, for which man provides because they are useful to him—and dogs!
Of all created things on our globe the canine race have the softest
“snap.”  The more one thinks about this curious exception in their favor
the more unaccountable it appears.  We neglect such wild things as we do
not slaughter, and exact toil from domesticated animals in return for
their keep.  Dogs alone, shirking all cares and labor, live in idle
comfort at man’s expense.

When that painful family jar broke up the little garden party in Eden and
forced our first parents to work or hunt for a living, the original Dog
(equally disgusted with either alternative) hit on the luminous idea of
posing as the champion of the disgraced couple, and attached himself to
Adam and Eve; not that he approved of their conduct, but simply because
he foresaw that if he made himself companionable and cosy he would be
asked to stay to dinner.

From that day to the present, with the exception of occasionally watching
sheep and houses—a lazy occupation at the best—and a little light carting
in Belgium (dogs were given up as turn-spits centuries ago, because they
performed that duty badly), no canine has raised a paw to do an honest
day’s work, neither has any member of the genus been known voluntarily to
perform a useful act.

How then—one asks one’s self in a wonder—did the myth originate that Dog
was the friend of Man?  Like a multitude of other fallacies taught to
innocent children, this folly must be unlearned later.  Friend of man,
indeed!  Why, the “Little Brothers of the Rich” are guileless
philanthropists in comparison with most canines, and unworthy to be named
in the same breath with them.  Dogs discovered centuries ago that to live
in luxury, it was only necessary to assume an exaggerated affection for
some wealthy mortal, and have since proved themselves past masters in a
difficult art in which few men succeed.  The number of human beings who
manage to live on their friends is small, whereas the veriest mongrel cur
contrives to enjoy food and lodging at some dupe’s expense.

Facts such as these, however, have not over-thrown the great dog myth.
One can hardly open a child’s book without coming across some tale of
canine intelligence and devotion.  My tender youth was saddened by the
story of one disinterested dog that refused to leave his master’s grave
and was found frozen at his post on a bleak winter’s morning.  With the
experience of years in pet dogs I now suspect that, instead of acting in
this theatrical fashion, that pup trotted home from the funeral with the
most prosperous and simple-minded couple in the neighborhood, and after a
substantial meal went to sleep by the fire.  He must have been a clever
dog to get so much free advertisement, so probably strolled out to his
master’s grave the next noon, when people were about to hear him, and
howled a little to keep up appearances.

I have written “the richest and most simple minded couple,” because
centuries of self-seeking have developed in these beasts an especial
aptitude for spotting possible victims at a glance.  You will rarely find
dogs coquetting with the strong-minded or wasting blandishments where
there is not the probability of immediate profit; but once let even a
puppy get a tenderhearted girl or aged couple under his influence, no
pity will be shown the victims.

There is a house not a square away from Mr. Gerry’s philanthropic
headquarters, where a state of things exists calculated to extract tears
from a custom-house official.  Two elderly virgins are there held in
bondage by a Minotaur no bigger than your two fists.  These good dames
have a taste for travelling, but change of climate disagrees with their
tyrant.  They dislike house-keeping and, like good Americans, would
prefer hotel life, nevertheless they keep up an establishment in a
cheerless side street, with a retinue of servants, because, forsooth,
their satrap exacts a back yard where he can walk of a morning.  These
spinsters, although loving sisters, no longer go about together,
Caligula’s nerves being so shaken that solitude upsets them.  He would
sooner expire than be left alone with the servant, for the excellent
reason that his bad temper and absurd airs have made him dangerous
enemies below stairs—and he knows it!

Another household in this city revolves around two brainless, goggle-eyed
beasts, imported at much expense from the slopes of Fuji-yama.  The care
that is lavished on those heathen monsters passes belief.  Maids are
employed to carry them up and down stairs, and men are called in the
night to hurry for a doctor when Chi has over-eaten or Fu develops colic;
yet their devoted mistress tells me, with tears in her eyes, that in
spite of this care, when she takes her darlings for a walk they do not
know her from the first stranger that passes, and will follow any boy who
whistles to them in the street.

What revolts me in the character of dogs is that, not content with
escaping from the responsibilities entailed on all the other inhabitants
of our globe by the struggle for existence, these four-legged Pecksniffs
have succeeded in making for themselves a fallacious reputation for
honesty and devotion.  What little lingering belief I had in canine
fidelity succumbed then I was told that St. Bernards—those models of
integrity and courage—have fallen into the habit of carrying the flasks
of brandy that the kind monks provide for the succor of snowbound
travellers, to the neighboring hamlets and exchanging the contents
for—chops!

Will the world ever wake to the true character of these four-legged
impostors and realize that instead of being disinterested and sincere,
most family pets are consummate hypocrites.  Innocent?  Pshaw!  Their
pretty, coaxing ways and pretences of affection are unadulterated guile;
their ostentatious devotion, simply a clever manœuvre to excite interest
and obtain unmerited praise.  It is useless, however, to hope that things
will change.  So long as this giddy old world goes on waltzing in space,
so long shall we continue to be duped by shams and pin our faith on
frauds, confounding an attractive bearing with a sweet disposition and
mistaking dishevelled hair and eccentric appearance for brains.  Even in
the Orient, where dogs have been granted immunity from other labor on the
condition that they organized an effective street-cleaning department,
they have been false to their trust and have evaded their contracts quite
as if they were Tammany braves, like whom they pass their days in slumber
and their nights in settling private disputes, while the city remains
uncleaned.

I nurse yet another grudge against the canine race!  That Voltaire of a
whelp, who imposed himself upon our confiding first parents, must have
had an important pull at headquarters, for he certainly succeeded in
getting the decree concerning beauty and fitness which applies to all
mammals, including man himself, reversed in favor of dogs, and handed
down to his descendants the secret of making defects and deformities pass
current as qualities.  While other animals are valued for sleek coats and
slender proportions, canine monstrosities have always been in demand.  We
do not admire squints or protruding under jaws in our own race, yet
bulldogs have persuaded many weak-minded people that these defects are
charming when combined in an individual of their breed.

The fox in the fable, who after losing his tail tried to make that
bereavement the fashion, failed in his undertaking; Dutch canal-boat dogs
have, however, been successful where the fox failed, and are to-day
pampered and prized for a curtailment that would condemn any other animal
(except perhaps a Manx cat) to a watery grave at birth.

I can only recall two instances where canine sycophants got their
deserts; the first tale (probably apocryphal) is about a donkey, for
years the silent victim of a little terrier who had been trained to lead
him to water and back.  The dog—as might have been expected—abused the
situation, while pretending to be very kind to his charge, never allowed
him to roll on the grass, as he would have liked, or drink in peace, and
harassed the poor beast in many other ways, getting, however, much credit
from the neighbors for devotion and intelligence.  Finally, one day after
months of waiting, the patient victim’s chance came.  Getting his
tormentor well out into deep water, the donkey quietly sat down on him.

The other tale is true, for I knew the lady who provided in her will that
her entire establishment should be kept up for the comfort and during the
life of the three fat spaniels that had solaced her declining years.  The
heirs tried to break the will and failed; the delighted domestics, seeing
before them a period of repose, proceeded (headed by the portly
housekeeper) to consult a “vet” as to how the life of the precious
legatees might be prolonged to the utmost.  His advice was to stop all
sweets and rich food and give each of the animals at least three hours of
hard exercise a day.  From that moment the lazy brutes led a dog’s life.
Water and the detested “Spratt“ biscuit, scorned in happier days, formed
their meagre ordinary; instead of somnolent airings in a softly cushioned
landau they were torn from chimney corner musings to be raced through
cold, muddy streets by a groom on horseback.

Those two tales give me the keenest pleasure.  When I am received on
entering a friend’s room with a chorus of yelps and attacked in dark
corners by snarling little hypocrites who fawn on me in their master’s
presence, I humbly pray that some such Nemesis may be in store for these
_faux bonhommes_ before they leave this world, as apparently no provision
has been made for their punishment in the next.




CHAPTER 3—Cyrano, Rostand, Coquelin


Among the proverbs of Spanish folk-lore there is a saying that good wine
retains its flavor in spite of rude bottles and cracked cups.  The
success of M. Rostand’s brilliant drama, _Cyrano de Bergerac_, in its
English dress proves once more the truth of this adage.  The fun and
pathos, the wit and satire, of the original pierce through the halting,
feeble translation like light through a ragged curtain, dazzling the
spectators and setting their enthusiasm ablaze.

Those who love the theatre at its best, when it appeals to our finer
instincts and moves us to healthy laughter and tears, owe a debt of
gratitude to Richard Mansfield for his courage in giving us, as far as
the difference of language and rhythm would allow, this _chef d’œuvre_
unchanged, free from the mutilations of the adapter, with the author’s
wishes and the stage decorations followed into the smallest detail.  In
this way we profit by the vast labor and study which Rostand and Coquelin
gave to the original production.

Rumors of the success attained by this play in Paris soon floated across
to us.  The two or three French booksellers here could not import the
piece fast enough to meet the ever increasing demand of our reading
public.  By the time spring came, there were few cultivated people who
had not read the new work and discussed its original language and daring
treatment.

On arriving in Paris, my first evening was passed at the Porte St.
Martin.  After the piece was over, I dropped into Coquelin’s
dressing-room to shake this old acquaintance by the hand and give him
news of his many friends in America.

Coquelin in his dressing-room is one of the most delightful of mortals.
The effort of playing sets his blood in motion and his wit sparkling.  He
seemed as fresh and gay that evening as though there were not five
killing acts behind him and the fatigue of a two-hundred-night run,
uninterrupted even by Sundays, added to his “record.”

After the operation of removing his historic nose had been performed and
the actor had resumed his own clothes and features, we got into his
carriage and were driven to his apartment in the Place de l’Etoile, a
cosy museum full of comfortable chairs and priceless bric-à-brac.  The
conversation naturally turned during supper on the piece and this new
author who had sprung in a night from obscurity to a globe-embracing
fame.  How, I asked, did you come across the play, and what decided you
to produce it?

Coquelin’s reply was so interesting that it will be better to repeat the
actor’s own words as he told his tale over the dismantled table in the
tranquil midnight hours.

“I had, like most Parisians, known Rostand for some time as the author of
a few graceful verses and a play (_Les Romanesques_) which passed almost
unnoticed at the Français.

“About four years ago Sarah Bernhardt asked me to her ‘hôtel’ to hear M.
Rostand read a play he had just completed for her.  I accepted
reluctantly, as at that moment we were busy at the theatre.  I also
doubted if there could be much in the new play to interest me.  It was
_La Princesse Lointaine_.  I shall remember that afternoon as long as I
live!  From the first line my attention was riveted and my senses were
charmed.  What struck me as even more remarkable than the piece was the
masterly power and finish with which the boyish author delivered his
lines.  Where, I asked myself, had he learned that difficult art?  The
great actress, always quick to respond to the voice of art, accepted the
play then and there.

“After the reading was over I walked home with M. Rostand, and had a long
talk with him about his work and ambitions.  When we parted at his door,
I said: ‘In my opinion, you are destined to become the greatest dramatic
poet of the age; I bind myself here and now to take any play you write
(in which there is a part for me) without reading it, to cancel any
engagements I may have on hand, and produce your piece with the least
possible delay.’ An offer I don’t imagine many young poets have ever
received, and which I certainly never before made to any author.

“About six weeks later my new acquaintance dropped in one morning to read
me the sketch he had worked out for a drama, the title rôle of which he
thought would please me.  I was delighted with the idea, and told him to
go ahead.  A month later we met in the street.  On asking him how the
play was progressing, to my astonishment he answered that he had
abandoned that idea and hit upon something entirely different.  Chance
had thrown in his way an old volume of Cyrano de Bergerac’s poems, which
so delighted him that he had been reading up the life and death of that
unfortunate poet.  From this reading had sprung the idea of making Cyrano
the central figure of a drama laid in the city of Richelieu, d’Artagnan,
and the _Précieuses Ridicules_, a seventeenth-century Paris of love and
duelling.

“At first this idea struck me as unfortunate.  The elder Dumas had worked
that vein so well and so completely, I doubted if any literary gold
remained for another author.  It seemed foolhardy to resuscitate the
_Three Guardsmen_ epoch—and I doubted if it were possible to carry out
his idea and play an intense and pathetic rôle disguised with a burlesque
nose.

“This contrasting of the grotesque and the sentimental was of course not
new.  Victor Hugo had broken away from classic tradition when he made a
hunchback the hero of a drama.  There remained, however, the risk of our
Parisian public not accepting the new situation seriously.  It seemed to
me like bringing the sublime perilously near the ridiculous.

“Fortunately, Rostand did not share this opinion or my doubts.  He was
full of enthusiasm for his piece and confident of its success.  We sat
where we had met, under the trees of the Champs Elysées, for a couple of
hours, turning the subject about and looking at the question from every
point of view.  Before we parted the poet had convinced me.  The role, as
he conceived it, was certainly original, and therefore tempting, opening
vast possibilities before my dazzled eyes.

“I found out later that Rostand had gone straight home after that
conversation and worked for nearly twenty hours without leaving the
study, where his wife found him at daybreak, fast asleep with his head on
a pile of manuscript.  He was at my rooms the next day before I was up,
sitting on the side of my bed, reading the result of his labor.  As the
story unfolded itself I was more and more delighted.  His idea of
resuscitating the quaint interior of the Hôtel de Bourgogne Theatre was
original, and the balcony scene, even in outline, enchanting.  After the
reading Rostand dashed off as he had come, and for many weeks I saw no
more of him.

“_La Princesse Lointaine_ was, in the meantime, produced by Sarah, first
in London and then in Paris.  In the English capital it was a failure;
with us it gained a _succès d’estime_, the fantastic grace and lightness
of the piece saving it from absolute shipwreck in the eyes of the
literary public.

“Between ourselves,” continued Coquelin, pushing aside his plate, a
twinkle in his small eyes, “is the reason of this lack of success very
difficult to discover?  The Princess in the piece is supposed to be a
fairy enchantress in her sixteenth year.  The play turns on her youth and
innocence.  Now, honestly, is Sarah, even on the stage, any one’s ideal
of youth and innocence?”  This was asked so naïvely that I burst into a
laugh, in which my host joined me.  Unfortunately, this grandmamma, like
Ellen Terry, cannot be made to understand that there are rôles she should
leave alone, that with all the illusions the stage lends she can no
longer play girlish parts with success.

“The failure of his play produced the most disastrous effect on Rostand,
who had given up a year of his life to its composition and was profoundly
chagrined by its fall.  He sank into a mild melancholy, refusing for more
than eighteen months to put pen to paper.  On the rare occasions when we
met I urged him to pull himself together and rise above disappointment.
Little by little, his friends were able to awaken his dormant interest
and get him to work again on _Cyrano_.  As he slowly regained confidence
and began taking pleasure once more in his work, the boyish author took
to dropping in on me at impossible morning hours to read some scene hot
from his ardent brain.  When seated by my bedside, he declaimed his lines
until, lit at his flame, I would jump out of bed, and wrapping my
dressing-gown hastily around me, seize the manuscript out of his hands,
and, before I knew it, find my self addressing imaginary audiences, poker
in hand, in lieu of a sword, with any hat that came to hand doing duty
for the plumed headgear of our hero.  Little by little, line upon line,
the masterpiece grew under his hands.  My career as an actor has thrown
me in with many forms of literary industry and dogged application, but
the power of sustained effort and untiring, unflagging zeal possessed by
that fragile youth surpassed anything I had seen.

“As the work began taking form, Rostand hired a place in the country, so
that no visitors or invitations might tempt him away from his daily toil.
Rich, young, handsome, married to a woman all Paris was admiring, with
every door, social or Bohemian, wide open before his birth and talent, he
voluntarily shut himself up for over a year in a dismal suburb, allowing
no amusement to disturb his incessant toil.  Mme. Rostand has since told
me that at one time she seriously feared for his reason if not for his
life, as he averaged ten hours a day steady work, and when the spell was
on him would pass night after night at his study table, rewriting,
cutting, modelling his play, never contented, always striving after a
more expressive adjective, a more harmonious or original rhyme, casting
aside a month’s finished work without a second thought when he judged
that another form expressed his idea more perfectly.

“That no success is cheaply bought I have long known; my profession above
all others is calculated to teach one that truth.

“If Rostand’s play is the best this century has produced, and our
greatest critics are unanimous in pronouncing it equal, if not superior,
to Victor Hugo’s masterpieces, the young author has not stolen his
laurels, but gained them leaf by leaf during endless midnight hours of
brain-wringing effort—a price that few in a generation would be willing
to give or capable of giving for fame.  The labor had been in proportion
to the success; it always is!  I doubt if there is one word in his ‘duel’
ballad that has not been changed again and again for a more fitting
expression, as one might assort the shades of a mosaic until a harmonious
whole is produced.  I have there in my desk whole scenes that he
discarded because they were not essential to the action of the piece.
They will probably never be printed, yet are as brilliant and cost their
author as much labor as any that the public applauded to-night.

“As our rehearsals proceeded I saw another side of Rostand’s character;
the energy and endurance hidden in his almost effeminate frame astonished
us all.  He almost lived at the theatre, drilling each actor, designing
each costume, ordering the setting of each scene.  There was not a dress
that he did not copy from some old print, or a _passade_ that he did not
indicate to the humblest member of the troop.  The marvellous diction
that I had noticed during the reading at Sarah’s served him now and gave
the key to the entire performance.  I have never seen him peevish or
discouraged, but always courteous and cheerful through all those weary
weeks of repetition, when even the most enthusiastic feel their courage
oozing away under the awful grind of afternoon and evening rehearsal, the
latter beginning at midnight after the regular performance was over.

“The news was somehow spread among the theatre-loving public that
something out if the ordinary was in preparation.  The papers took up the
tale and repeated it until the whole capital was keyed up to concert
pitch.  The opening night was eagerly awaited by the critics, the
literary and the artistic worlds.  When the curtain rose on the first act
there was the emotion of a great event floating in the air.”  Here
Coquelin’s face assumed an intense expression I had rarely seen there
before.  He was back on the stage, living over again the glorious hours
of that night’s triumph.  His breath was coming quick and his eyes aglow
with the memory of that evening.  “Never, never have I lived through such
an evening.  Victor Hugo’s greatest triumph, the first night of
_Hernani_, was the only theatrical event that can compare to it.  It,
however, was injured by the enmity of a clique who persistently hissed
the new play.  There is but one phrase to express the enthusiasm at our
first performance—_une salle en délire_ gives some idea of what took
place.  As the curtain fell on each succeeding act the entire audience
would rise to its feet, shouting and cheering for ten minutes at a time.
The coulisse and the dressing-rooms were packed by the critics and the
author’s friends, beside themselves with delight.  I was trembling so I
could hardly get from one costume into another, and had to refuse my door
to every one.  Amid all this confusion Rostand alone remained cool and
seemed unconscious of his victory.  He continued quietly giving last
recommendations to the figurants, overseeing the setting of the scenes,
and thanking the actors as they came off the stage, with the same
self-possessed urbanity he had shown during the rehearsals.  Finally,
when the play was over, and we had time to turn and look for him, our
author had disappeared, having quietly driven off with his wife to their
house in the country, from which he never moved for a week.”

It struck two o’clock as Coquelin ended.  The sleepless city had at last
gone to rest.  At our feet, as we stood by the open window, the great
square around the Arc de Triomphe lay silent and empty, its vast arch
rising dimly against the night sky.

As I turned to go, Coquelin took my hand and remarked, smiling: “Now you
have heard the story of a genius, an actor, and a masterpiece.”




CHAPTER 4—Machine-made Men


Among the commonplace white and yellow envelopes that compose the bulk of
one’s correspondence, appear from time to time dainty epistles on tinted
paper, adorned with crests or monograms.  “Ha! ha!” I think when one of
these appears, “here is something worth opening!”  For between ourselves,
reader mine, old bachelors love to receive notes from women.  It’s so
flattering to be remembered by the dear creatures, and recalls the time
when life was beginning, and _poulets_ in feminine writing suggested such
delightful possibilities.

Only this morning an envelope of delicate Nile green caused me a distinct
thrill of anticipation.  To judge by appearances it could contain nothing
less attractive than a declaration, so, tearing it hurriedly open, I
read: “Messrs. Sparks & Splithers take pleasure in calling attention to
their patent suspenders and newest designs in reversible paper collars!”

Now, if that’s not enough to put any man in a bad humor for twenty-four
hours, I should like to know what is?  Moreover, I have “patents” in
horror, experience having long ago revealed the fact that a patent is
pretty sure to be only a new way of doing fast and cheaply something that
formerly was accomplished slowly and well.

Few people stop to think how quickly this land of ours is degenerating
into a paradise of the cheap and nasty, but allow themselves to be heated
and cooled and whirled about the streets to the detriment of their nerves
and digestions, under the impression that they are enjoying the benefits
of modern progress.

So complex has life become in these later days that the very beds we lie
on and the meals we eat are controlled by patents.  Every garment and
piece of furniture now pays a “royalty” to some inventor, from the hats
on our heads to the carpets under foot, which latter are not only
manufactured, but cleaned and shaken by machinery, and (be it remarked
_en passant_) lose their nap prematurely in the process.  To satisfy our
national love of the new, an endless and nameless variety of trifles
appears each season, so-called labor and time-saving combinations, that
enjoy a brief hour of vogue, only to make way for a newer series of
inventions.

As long as our geniuses confined themselves to making life one long and
breathless scramble, it was bad enough, but a line should have been drawn
where meddling with the sanctity of the toilet began.  This, alas! was
not done.  Nothing has remained sacred to the inventor.  In consequence,
the average up-to-date American is a walking collection of Yankee
notions, an ingenious illusion, made up of patents, requiring as nice
adjustment to put together and undo as a thirteenth-century warrior, and
carrying hardly less metal about his person than a Crusader of old.

There are a number of haberdashery shops on Broadway that have caused me
to waste many precious minutes gazing into their windows and wondering
what the strange instruments of steel and elastic could be, that were
exhibited alongside of the socks and ties.  The uses of these would, in
all probability, have remained wrapped in mystery but for the experience
of one fateful morning (after a night in a sleeping-car), when countless
hidden things were made clear, as I sat, an awestruck witness to my
fellow-passengers’—toilets?—No!  Getting their machinery into running
order for the day, would be a more correct expression.

Originally, “tags” were the backbone of the toilet, different garments
being held together by their aid.  Later, buttons and attendant
button-holes were evolved, now replaced by the devices used in composing
the machine-made man.  As far as I could see (I have overcome a natural
delicacy in making my discoveries public, because it seems unfair to keep
all this information to myself), nothing so archaic as a button-hole is
employed at the present time by our patent-ridden compatriots.  The
shirt, for instance, which was formerly such a simple-minded and
straightforward garment, knowing no guile, has become, in the hands of
the inventors, a mere pretence, a frail scaffold, on which an elaborate
superstructure of shams is erected.

The varieties of this garment that one sees in the shop windows, exposing
virgin bosoms to the day, are not what they seem!  Those very bosoms are
fakes, and cannot open, being instead pierced by eyelets, into which
bogus studs are fixed by machinery.  The owner is obliged to enter into
those deceptive garments surreptitiously from the rear, by stratagem, as
it were.  Why all this trouble, one asks, for no apparent reason, except
that old-fashioned shirts opened in front, and no Yankee will wear a
non-patented garment—if he can help it?

There was not a single accessory to the toilet in that car which behaved
in a normal way.  Buttons mostly backed into place, tail-end foremost
(like horses getting between shafts), where some hidden mechanism screwed
or clinched them to their moorings.

Collars and cuffs (integral parts of the primitive garment) are now a
labyrinth, in which all but the initiated must lose themselves, being
double-decked, detachable, reversible, and made of every known substance
except linen.  The cuff most in favor can be worn four different ways,
and is attached to the shirt by a steel instrument three inches long,
with a nipper at each end.  The amount of white visible below the
coat-sleeve is regulated by another contrivance, mostly of elastic, worn
further up the arm, around the biceps.  Modern collars are retained in
position by a system of screws and levers.  Socks are attached no longer
with the old-fashioned garter, but by aid of a little harness similar to
that worn by pug-dogs.

One traveller, after lacing his shoes, adjusted a contrivance resembling
a black beetle on the knot to prevent its untying.  He also wore
“hygienic suspenders,” a discovery of great importance (over three
thousand patents have been taken out for this one necessity of the
toilet!).  This brace performs several tasks at the same time, such as
holding unmentionable garments in place, keeping the wearer erect, and
providing a night-key guard.  It is also said to cure liver and kidney
disease by means of an arrangement of pulleys which throw the strain
according to the wearer’s position—I omit the rest of its qualities!

The watches of my companions, I noticed with astonishment, all wore
India-rubber ruffs around their necks.  Here curiosity getting the better
of discretion, I asked what purpose that invention served.  It was
graciously explained to me how such ruffs prevented theft.  They were so
made that it was impossible to draw your watch out of a pocket unless you
knew the trick, which struck me as a mitigated blessing.  In fact, the
idea kept occurring that life might become terribly uncomfortable under
these complex conditions for absent-minded people.

Pencils, I find, are no longer put into pockets or slipped behind the
ear.  Every commercial “gent” wears a patent on his chest, where his pen
and pencil nestle in a coil of wire.  Eyeglasses are not allowed to
dangle aimlessly about, as of old, but retire with a snap into an oval
box, after the fashion of roller shades.  Scarf-pins have guards screwed
on from behind, and undergarments—but here modesty stops my pen.

Seeing that I was interested in their make-up, several travelling agents
on the train got out their boxes and showed me the latest artifices that
could be attached to the person.  One gentleman produced a collection of
rings made to go on the finger with a spring, like bracelets, an
arrangement, he explained, that was particularly convenient for people
afflicted with enlarged joints!

Another tempted me with what he called a “literary shirt front,”—it was
in fact a paper pad, from which for cleanliness a leaf could be peeled
each morning; the “wrong” side of the sheet thus removed contained a
calendar, much useful information, and the chapters of a “continued”
story, which ended when the “dickey” was used up.

A third traveller was “pushing” a collar-button that plied as many trades
as Figaro, combining the functions of cravat-holder, stud, and scarf-pin.
Not being successful in selling me one of these, he brought forward
something ”without which,” he assured me, “no gentleman’s wardrobe was
complete”!  It proved to be an insidious arrangement of gilt wire, which
he adjusted on his poor, overworked collar-button, and then tied his
cravat through and around it.  “No tie thus made,” he said, “would ever
slip or get crooked.”  He had been so civil that it was embarrassing not
to buy something of him; I invested twenty-five cents in the
cravat-holder, as it seemed the least complicated of the patents on
exhibition; not, however, having graduated in a school of mechanics I
have never been able to make it work.  It takes an hour to tie a cravat
with its aid, and as long to get it untied.  Most of the men in that car,
I found, got around the difficulty by wearing ready-made ties which
fastened behind with a clasp.

It has been suggested that the reason our compatriots have such a
strained and anxious look is because they are all trying to remember the
numbers of their streets and houses, the floor their office is on, and
the combination of their safes.  I am inclined to think that the hunted
look we wear comes from an awful fear of forgetting the secrets of our
patents and being unable to undo ourselves in an emergency!

Think for a moment of the horror of coming home tired and sleepy after a
convivial evening, and finding that some of your hidden machinery had
gone wrong; that by a sudden movement you had disturbed the nice balance
of some lever which in revenge refused to release its prey!  The
inventors of one well-known cuff-holder claim that it had a “bull-dog
grip.”  Think of sitting dressed all night in the embrace of that
mechanical canine until the inventor could be called in to set you free!

I never doubted that bravery was the leading characteristic of the
American temperament; since that glimpse into the secret composition of
my compatriots, admiration has been vastly increased.  The foolhardy
daring it must require—dressed as those men were—to go out in a
thunder-storm makes one shudder: it certainly could not be found in any
other race.  The danger of cross-country hunting or bull-fighting is as
nothing compared to the risk a modern American takes when he sits in a
trolley-car, where the chances of his machinery forming a fatal “short
circuit” must be immense.  The utter impossibility in which he finds
himself of making a toilet quickly on account of so many time-saving
accessories must increase his chances of getting “left” in an accident
about fifty per cent.  Who but one of our people could contemplate with
equanimity the thought of attempting the adjustment of such delicate and
difficult combinations while a steamer was sinking and the life-boats
being manned?

Our grandfathers contributed the wooden nutmeg to civilization, and
endowed a grateful universe with other money-saving devices.  To-day the
inventor takes the American baby from his cradle and does not release him
even at the grave.  What a treat one of the machine-made men of to-day
will be to the archeologists of the year 3000, when they chance upon a
well-preserved specimen, with all his patents thick upon I him!  With a
prophetic eye one can almost see the kindly old gentleman of that day
studying the paraphernalia found in the tomb and attempting to account
for the different pieces.  Ink will flow and discussions rage between the
camp maintaining that cuff-holders were tutelar deities buried with the
dead by pious relatives and the croup asserting that the little pieces of
steel were a form of pocket money in the year 1900.  Both will probably
misquote Tennyson and Kipling in support of their theories.

The question has often been raised, What side of our nineteenth-century
civilization will be most admired by future generations?  In view of the
above facts there can remain little doubt that when the secrets of the
paper collar and the trouser-stretcher have become lost arts, it will be
those benefits that remote ages will envy us, and rare specimens of
“ventilated shoes” and “reversible tissue-paper undergarments” will form
the choicest treasures of the collector.




CHAPTER 5—Parnassus


Many years ago, a gentleman with whom I was driving in a distant quarter
of Paris took me to a house on the rue Montparnasse, where we remained an
hour or more, he chatting with its owner, and I listening to their
conversation, and wondering at the confusion of books in the big room.
As we drove away, my companion turned to me and said, “Don’t forget this
afternoon.  You have seen one of the greatest writers our century has
produced, although the world does not yet realize it.  You will learn to
love his works when you are older, and it will be a satisfaction to
remember that you saw and spoke with him in the flesh! “

When I returned later to Paris the little house had changed hands, and a
marble tablet stating that Sainte-Beuve had lived and died there adorned
its façade.  My student footsteps took me many times through that quiet
street, but never without a vision of the poet-critic flashing back, as I
glanced up at the window where he had stood and talked with us; as my
friend predicted, Sainte-Beuve’s writings had become a precious part of
my small library, the memory of his genial face adding a vivid interest
to their perusal.

I made a little Pilgrimage recently to the quiet old garden where, after
many years’ delay, a bust of this writer has been unveiled, with the same
companion, now very old, who thirty years ago presented me to the
original.

There is, perhaps, in all Paris no more exquisite corner than the Garden
of the Luxembourg.  At every season it is beautiful.  The winter sunlight
seems to linger on its stately Italian terraces after it has ceased to
shine elsewhere.  The first lilacs bloom here in the spring, and when
midsummer has turned all the rest of Paris into a blazing, white
wilderness, these gardens remain cool and tranquil in the heart of
turbulent “Bohemia,” a bit of fragrant nature filled with the song of
birds and the voices of children.  Surely it was a gracious inspiration
that selected this shady park as the “Poets’ Corner” of great, new Paris.
Henri Murger, Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, Paul Verlaine, are
here, and now Sainte-Beuve has come back to his favorite haunt.  Like
François Coppée and Victor Hugo, he loved these historic _allées_, and
knew the stone in them as he knew the “Latin Quater,” for his life was
passed between the bookstalls of the quays and the outlying street where
he lived.

As we sat resting in the shade, my companion, who had been one of
Sainte-Beuve’s pupils, fell to talking of his master, his memory
refreshed by the familiar surroundings.  “Can anything be sadder,” he
said, “than finding a face one has loved turned into stone, or names that
were the watchwords of one’s youth serving as signs at street corners—la
rue Flaubert or Théodore de Banville?  How far away they make the past
seem!  Poor Sainte-Beuve, that bust yonder is but a poor reward for a
life of toil, a modest tribute to his encyclopædic brain!  His works,
however, are his best monument; he would be the last to repine or cavil.

“The literary world of my day had two poles, between which it vibrated.
The little house in the rue Montparnasse was one, the rock of Guernsey
the other.  We spoke with awe of ‘Father Hugo’ and mentioned ‘Uncle
Beuve’ with tenderness.  The Goncourt brothers accepted Sainte-Beuve’s
judgment on their work as the verdict of a ‘Supreme Court.’  Not a poet
or author of that day but climbed with a beating heart the narrow
staircase that led to the great writer’s library.  Paul Verlaine regarded
as his literary diploma a letter from this ‘Balzac de la critique.’ ”

“At the entrance of the quaint Passage du Commerce, under the arch that
leads into the rue Saint-André-des-Arts, stands a hotel, where for years
Sainte-Beuve came daily to work (away from the importunate who besieged
his dwelling) in a room hired under the assumed name of Delorme.  It was
there that we sent him a basket of fruit one morning addressed to Mr.
Delorme, _né_ Sainte-Beuve.  It was there that most of his enormous labor
was accomplished.

“A curious corner of old Paris that Cour du Commerce!  Just opposite his
window was the apartment where Danton lived.  If one chose to seek for
them it would not be hard to discover on the pavement of this same
passage the marks made by a young doctor in decapitating sheep with his
newly invented machine.  The doctor’s name was Guillotin.

“The great critic loved these old quarters filled with history.  He was
fond of explaining that Montparnasse had been a hill where the students
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came to amuse themselves.  In
1761 the slope was levelled and the boulevard laid out, but the name was
predestined, he would declare, for the habitation of the ‘Parnassiens.’

“His enemies pretended that you had but to mention Michelet, Balzac, and
Victor Hugo to see Sainte-Beuve in three degrees of rage.  He had, it is
true, distinct expressions on hearing those authors discussed.  The
phrase then much used in speaking of an original personality, ‘He is like
a character out of Balzac,’ always threw my master into a temper.  I
cannot remember, however, having seen him in one of those famous rages
which made Barbey d’Aurévilly say that ‘Sainte-Beuve was a clever man
with the temper of a turkey!’  The former was much nearer the truth when
he called the author of _Les Lundis_ a French Wordsworth, or compared him
to a lay _bénédictin_.  He had a way of reading a newly acquired volume
as he walked through the streets that was typical of his life.  My master
was always studying and always advancing.

“He never entirely recovered from his mortification at being hissed by
the students on the occasion of his first lecture at the Collège de
France.  Returning home he loaded two pistols, one for the first student
who should again insult him, and the other to blow out his own brains.
It was no idle threat.  The man Guizot had nicknamed ‘Werther’ was
capable of executing his plan, for this causeless unpopularity was
anguish to him.  After his death, I found those two pistols loaded in his
bedroom, but justice had been done another way.  All opposition had
vanished.  Every student in the ‘Quarter’ followed the modest funeral of
their Senator, who had become the champion of literary liberty in an
epoch when poetry was held in chains.

“The Empire which made him Senator gained, however, but an indocile
recruit.  On his one visit to Compiègne in 1863, the Emperor, wishing to
be particularly gracious, said to him, ‘I always read the _Moniteur_ on
Monday, when your article appears.’  Unfortunately for this compliment,
it was the _Constitutionnel_ that had been publishing the _Nouveaux
Lundis_ for more than four years.  In spite of the united efforts of his
friends, Sainte-Beuve could not be brought to the point of complimenting
Napoleon III. on his _Life of Cæsar_.

The author of _Les Consolations_ remained through life the proudest and
most independent of men, a bourgeois, enemy of all tyranny, asking
protection of no one.  And what a worker!  Reading, sifting, studying,
analyzing his subject before composing one of his famous _Lundis_, a
literary portrait which he aimed at making complete and final.  One of
these articles cost him as much labor as other authors give to the
composition of a volume.

“By way of amusement on Sunday evenings, when work was temporarily laid
aside, he loved the theatre, delighting in every kind of play, from the
broad farces of the Palais Royal to the tragedies of Racine, and
entertaining comedians in order, as he said, ‘to keep young’!  One
evening Théophile Gautier brought a pretty actress to dinner.
Sainte-Beuve, who was past-master in the difficult art of conversation,
and on whom a fair woman acted as an inspiration, surpassed himself on
this occasion, surprising even the Goncourts with his knowledge of the
Eighteenth century and the women of that time, Mme. de Boufflers, Mlle.
de Lespinasse, la Maréchale de Luxembourg.  The hours flew by unheeded by
all of his guests but one.  The _débutante_ was overheard confiding,
later in the evening, to a friend at the Gymnase, where she performed in
the last act, ‘Ouf!  I’m glad to get here.  I‘ve been dining with a
stupid old Senator.  They told me he would be amusing, but I’ve been
bored to death.’  Which reminded me of my one visit to England, when I
heard a young nobleman declare that he had been to ‘such a dull dinner to
meet a duffer called “Renan!” ’

“Sainte-Beuve’s _Larmes de Racine_ was given at the Théâtre Français
during its author’s last illness.  His disappointment at not seeing the
performance was so keen that M. Thierry, then _administrateur_ of La
Comédie, took Mlle. Favart to the rue Montparnasse, that she might recite
his verses to the dying writer.  When the actress, then in the zenith of
her fame and beauty, came to the lines—

    Jean Racine, le grand poête,
    Le poête aimant et pieux,
    Après que sa lyre muette
    Se fut voilèe à tous les yeux,
    Renonçant à la gloire humaine,
    S’il sentait en son âme pleine
    Le flot contenu murmurer,
    Ne savait que fondre en prière,
    Pencher l’urne dans la poussière
    Aux pieds du Seigneur, et pleurer!

the tears of Sainte-Beuve accompanied those of Racine!”

There were tears also in the eyes my companion turned toward me as he
concluded.  The sun had set while he had been speaking.  The marble of
the statues gleamed white against the shadows of the sombre old garden.
The guardians were closing the gates and warning the lingering visitors
as we strolled toward the entrance.

It seemed as if we had been for an hour in the presence of the portly
critic; and the circle of brilliant men and witty women who surrounded
him—Flaubert, Tourguéneff, Théophile Gautier, Renan, George Sand—were
realities at that moment, not abstractions with great names.  It was like
returning from another age, to step out again into the glare and bustle
of the Boulevard St. Michel.




CHAPTER 6—Modern Architecture


If a foreign tourist, ignorant of his whereabouts, were to sail about
sunset up our spacious bay and view for the first time the eccentric
sky-line of lower New York, he would rub his eyes and wonder if they were
not playing him a trick, for distance and twilight lend the chaotic
masses around the Battery a certain wild grace suggestive of Titan
strongholds or prehistoric abodes of Wotan, rather than the business part
of a practical modern city.

“But,” as John Drew used to say in _The Masked Ball_, “what a difference
in the morning!” when a visit to his banker takes the new arrival down to
Wall Street, and our uncompromising American daylight dispels his
illusions.

Years ago _spiritual_ Arthur Gilman mourned over the decay of
architecture in New York and pointed out that Stewart’s shop, at Tenth
Street, bore about the same relation to Ictinus’ noble art as an iron
cooking stove!  It is well death removed the Boston critic before our
city entered into its present Brobdingnagian phase.  If he considered
that Stewart’s and the Fifth Avenue Hotel failed in artistic beauty, what
would have been his opinion of the graceless piles that crowd our island
to-day, beside which those older buildings seem almost classical in their
simplicity?

One hardly dares to think what impression a student familiar with the
symmetry of Old World structures must receive on arriving for the first
time, let us say, at the Bowling Green, for the truth would then dawn
upon him that what appeared from a distance to be the ground level of the
island was in reality the roof line of average four-story buildings, from
among which the keeps and campaniles that had so pleased him (when viewed
from the Narrows) rise like gigantic weeds gone to seed in a field of
grass.

It is the heterogeneous character of the buildings down town that renders
our streets so hideous.  Far from seeking harmony, builders seem to be
trying to “go” each other “one story better”; if they can belittle a
neighbor in the process it is clear gain, and so much advertisement.
Certain blocks on lower Broadway are gems in this way!  Any one who has
glanced at an auctioneer’s shelves when a “job lot” of books is being
sold, will doubtless have noticed their resemblance to the sidewalks of
our down town streets.  Dainty little duodecimo buildings are squeezed in
between towering in-folios, and richly bound and tooled octavos chum with
cheap editions.  Our careless City Fathers have not even given themselves
the trouble of pushing their stone and brick volumes into the same line,
but allow them to straggle along the shelf—I beg pardon, the
sidewalk—according to their own sweet will.

The resemblance of most new business buildings to flashy books increases
the more one studies them; they have the proportions of school atlases,
and, like them, are adorned only on their backs (read fronts).  The
modern builder, like the frugal binder, leaves the sides of his creations
unadorned, and expends his ingenuity in decorating the narrow strip which
he naively imagines will be the only part seen, calmly ignoring the fact
that on glancing up or down a street the sides of houses are what we see
first.  It is almost impossible to get mathematically opposite a
building, yet that is the only point from which these new constructions
are not grotesque.

It seems as though the rudiments of common sense would suggest that under
existing circumstances the less decoration put on a façade the greater
would be the harmony of the whole.  But trifles like harmony and fitness
are splendidly ignored by the architects of to-day, who, be it remarked
in passing, have slipped into another curious habit for which I should
greatly like to see an explanation offered.  As long as the ground floors
and the tops of their creations are elaborate, the designer evidently
thinks the intervening twelve or fifteen stories can shift for
themselves.  One clumsy mass on the Bowling Green is an excellent example
of this weakness.  Its ground floor is a playful reproduction of the
tombs of Egypt.  About the second story the architect must have become
discouraged—or perhaps the owner’s funds gave out—for the next dozen
floors are treated in the severest “tenement house” manner; then, as his
building terminates well up in the sky, a top floor or two are, for no
apparent reason, elaborately adorned.  Indeed, this desire for a
brilliant finish pervades the neighborhood.  The Johnson Building on
Broad Street (to choose one out of the many) is sober and discreet in
design for a dozen stories, but bursts at its top into a Byzantine
colonnade.  Why? one asks in wonder.

Another new-comer, corner of Wall and Nassau Streets, is a commonplace
structure, with a fairly good cornice, on top of which—an afterthought,
probably—a miniature State Capitol has been added, with dome and
colonnade complete.  The result recalls dear, absent-minded Miss Matty
(in Mrs. Gaskell’s charming story), when she put her best cap on top of
an old one and sat smiling at her visitors from under the double
headdress!

Nowhere in the world—not even in Moscow, that city of domes—can one see
such a collection of pagodas, cupolas, kiosks, and turrets as grace the
roofs of our office buildings!  Architects evidently look upon such
adornments as compensations!  The more hideous the structure, the finer
its dome!  Having perpetrated a blot upon the city that cries to heaven
in its enormity, the repentant owner adds a pagoda or two, much in the
same spirit, doubtless, as prompts an Italian peasant to hang a votive
heart on some friendly shrine when a crime lies heavy on his conscience.

What would be thought of a book-collector who took to standing inkstands
or pepperboxes on the tops of his tallest volumes by way of adornment?
Yet domes on business buildings are every bit as appropriate.  A choice
collection of those monstrosities graces Park Row, one much-gilded
offender varying the monotony by looking like a yellow stopper in a
high-shouldered bottle!  How modern architects with the exquisite City
Hall before them could have wandered so far afield in their search for
the original must always remain a mystery.

When a tall, thin building happens to stand on a corner, the likeness to
an atlas is replaced by a grotesque resemblance to a waffle iron, of
which one structure just finished on Rector Street skilfully reproduces’
the lines.  The rows of little windows were evidently arranged to imitate
the indentations on that humble utensil, and the elevated road at the
back seems in this case to do duty as the handle.  Mrs. Van Rensselaer
tells us in her delightful _Goede Vrouw of Mana-ha-ta_ that waffle irons
used to be a favorite wedding present among the Dutch settlers of this
island, and were adorned with monograms and other devices, so perhaps it
is atavism that makes us so fond of this form in building!  As, however,
no careful _Hausfrau_ would have stood her iron on its edge, architects
should hesitate before placing their buildings in that position, as the
impression of instability is the same in each case.

After leaving the vicinity of the City Hall, the tall slabs that like
magnified milestones mark the progress of Architecture up Broadway become
a shade less objectionable, although one meets some strange freaks in
so-called decoration by the way.  Why, for instance, were those Titan
columns grouped around the entrance to the American Surety Company’s
building?  They do not support anything (the “business” of columns in
architecture) except some rather feeble statuary, and do seriously block
the entrance.  Were they added with the idea of fitness?  That can hardly
be, for a portico is as inappropriate to such a building as it would be
to a parlor car, and almost as inconvenient.

Farther up town our attention is arrested by another misplaced adornment.
What purpose can that tomb with a railing round it serve on top of the
New York Life Insurance building?  It looks like a monument in Greenwood,
surmounted by a rat-trap, but no one is interred there, and vermin can
hardly be troublesome at that altitude.

How did this craze for decoration originate?  The inhabitants of Florence
and Athens did not consider it necessary.  There must, I feel sure, be a
reason for its use in this city; American land-lords rarely spend money
without a purpose; perhaps they find that rococo detail draws business
and inspires confidence!

I should like to ask the architects of New York one question: Have they
not been taught that in their art, as in every other, pretences are
vulgar, that things should be what they seem?  Then why do they continue
to hide steel and fire-brick cages under a veneer of granite six inches
thick, causing them to pose as solid stone buildings?  If there is a
demand for tall, light structures, why not build them simply (as bridges
are constructed), and not add a poultice of bogus columns and zinc
cornices that serve no purpose and deceive no one?

Union Square possesses blocks out of which the Jackson and Decker
buildings spring with a noble disregard of all rules and a delicious
incongruity that reminds one of Falstaff’s corps of ill-drilled soldiers.
Madison Square, however, is _facile princeps_, with its annex to the
Hoffman House, a building which would make the fortune of any dime museum
that could fence it in and show it for a fee!  Long contemplation of this
structure from my study window has printed every comic detail on my
brain.  It starts off at the ground level to be an imitation of the
Doge’s Palace (a neat and appropriate idea in itself for a Broadway
shop).  At the second story, following the usual New York method, it
reverts to a design suggestive of a county jail (the Palace and the
Prison), with here and there a balcony hung out, emblematical, doubtless,
of the inmates’ wash and bedding.  At the ninth floor the repentant
architect adds two more stories in memory of the Doge’s residence.  Have
you ever seen an accordion (concertina, I believe, is the correct name)
hanging in a shop window?  The Twenty-fifth Street Doge’s Palace reminds
me of that humble instrument.  The wooden part, where the keys and round
holes are, stands on the sidewalk.  Then come an indefinite number of
pleats, and finally the other wooden end well up among the clouds.  So
striking is this resemblance that at times one expects to hear the
long-drawn moans peculiar to the concertina issuing from those portals.
Alas! even the most original designs have their drawbacks!  After the
proprietor of the Venetian accordion had got his instrument well drawn
out and balanced on its end, he perceived that it dwarfed the adjacent
buildings, so cast about in his mind for a scheme to add height and
dignity to the rest of the block.  One day the astonished neighborhood
saw what appeared to be a “roomy suburban villa” of iron rising on the
roof of the old Hoffman House.  The results suggests a small man who,
being obliged to walk with a giant, had put on a hat several times too
large in order to equalize their heights!

How astonished Pericles and his circle of architects and sculptors would
be could they stand on the corner of Broadway and Twenty-eighth Street
and see the miniature Parthenon that graces the roof of a pile innocent
of other Greek ornament?  They would also recognize their old friends,
the ladies of the Erechtheum, doing duty on the Reveillon Building across
the way, pretending to hold up a cornice, which, being in proportion to
the building, is several hundred times too big for them to carry.  They
can’t be seen from the sidewalk,—the street is too narrow for that,—but
such trifles don’t deter builders from decorating when the fit is on
them.  Perhaps this one got his caryatides at a bargain, and had to work
them in somewhere; so it is not fair to be hard on him.

If ever we take to ballooning, all these elaborate tops may add
materially to our pleasure.  At the present moment the birds, and angels,
it is to be hoped, appreciate the effort.  I, perhaps, of all the
inhabitants of the city, have seen those ladies face to face, when I have
gone on a semi-monthly visit to my roof to look for leaks!

“It’s all very well to carp and cavil,” many readers will say, “but
‘Idler’ forgets that our modern architects have had to contend with
difficulties that the designers of other ages never faced, demands for
space and light forcing the nineteenth-century builders to produce
structures which they know are neither graceful nor in proportion!”

If my readers will give themselves the trouble to glance at several
office buildings in the city, they will realize that the problem is not
without a solution.  In almost every case where the architect has
refrained from useless decoration and stuck to simple lines, the result,
if not beautiful, has at least been inoffensive.  It is where
inappropriate elaboration is added that taste is offended.  Such
structures as the Singer building, corner of Liberty Street and Broadway,
and the home of _Life_, in Thirty-first Street, prove that beauty and
grace of façade can be adapted to modern business wants.

Feeling as many New Yorkers do about this defacing of what might have
been the most beautiful of modern cities, it is galling to be called upon
to admire where it is already an effort to tolerate.

A sprightly gentleman, writing recently in a scientific weekly, goes into
ecstasies of admiration over the advantages and beauty of a steel
mastodon on Park Row, a building that has the proportions of a
carpenter’s plane stood on end, decorated here and there with balconies
and a colonnade perched on brackets up toward its fifteenth story.  He
complacently gives us its weight and height as compared with the
pyramids, and numerous other details as to floor space and ventilation,
and hints in conclusion that only old fogies and dullards, unable to keep
pace with the times, fail to appreciate the charm of such structures in a
city.  One of the “points” this writer makes is the quality of air
enjoyed by tenants, amusingly oblivious of the fact that at least three
façades of each tall building will see the day only so long as the
proprietors of adjacent land are too poor or too busy to construct
similar colossi!

When all the buildings in a block are the same height, seven eighths of
the rooms in each will be without light or ventilation.  It’s rather poor
taste to brag of advantages that are enjoyed only through the generosity
of one’s neighbors.

Business demands may force us to bow before the necessity of these
horrors, but it certainly is “rubbing it in” to ask our applause.  When
the Eiffel Tower was in course of construction, the artists and literary
lights of Paris raised a tempest of protest.  One wonders why so little
of the kind has been done here.  It is perhaps rather late in the day to
suggest reform, yet if more New Yorkers would interest themselves in the
work, much might still be done to modify and improve our metropolis.

One hears with satisfaction that a group of architects have lately met
and discussed plans for the embellishment of our neglected city.  There
is a certain poetical justice in the proposition coming from those who
have worked so much of the harm.  Remorse has before now been known to
produce good results.  The United States treasury yearly receives large
sums of “conscience money.”




CHAPTER 7—Worldly Color-Blindness


Myriads of people have no ear for music and derive but little pleasure
from sweet sounds.  Strange as it may appear, many gifted and sensitive
mortals have been unable to distinguish one note from another, Apollo’s
harmonious art remaining for them, as for the elder Dumas, only an
“expensive noise.”

Another large class find it impossible to discriminate between colors.
Men afflicted in this way have even become painters of reputation.  I
knew one of the latter, who, when a friend complimented him on having
caught the exact shade of a pink toilet in one of his portraits,
answered, “Does that dress look pink to you?  I thought it was green!”
and yet he had copied what he saw correctly.

Both these classes are to be pitied, but are not the cause of much
suffering to others.  It is annoying, I grant you, to be torn asunder in
a collision, because red and green lights on the switches combined into a
pleasing harmony before the brakeman’s eyes.  The tone-deaf gentleman who
insists on whistling a popular melody is almost as trying as the lady
suffering from the same weakness, who shouts, “Ninon, Ninon, que fais-tu
de la vie!” until you feel impelled to cry, ”Que faites-vous, madame,
with the key?”

Examinations now keep daltonic gentlemen out of locomotives, and ladies
who have lost their “keys” are apt to find their friends’ pianos closed.
What we cannot guard against is a variety of the genus _homo_ which
suffers from “social color-blindness.”  These well-meaning mortals form
one of the hardest trials that society is heir to; for the disease is
incurable, and as it is almost impossible to escape from them, they
continue to spread dismay and confusion along their path to the bitter
end.

This malady, which, as far as I know, has not been diagnosed, invades all
circles, and is, curiously enough, rampant among well-born and apparently
well-bred people.

Why is it that the entertainments at certain houses are always dull
failures, while across the way one enjoys such agreeable evenings?  Both
hosts are gentlemen, enjoying about the same amount of “unearned
increment,” yet the atmosphere of their houses is radically different.
This contrast cannot be traced to the dulness or brilliancy of the
entertainer and his wife.  Neither can it be laid at the door of
inexperience, for the worst offenders are often old hands at the game.

The only explanation possible is that the owners of houses where one is
bored are socially color-blind, as cheerfully unconscious of their
weakness as the keyless lady and the whistling abomination.

Since increasing wealth has made entertaining general and lavish, this
malady has become more and more apparent, until one is tempted to parody
Mme. Roland’s dying exclamation and cry, “Hospitality! hospitility! what
crimes are committed in thy name!”

Entertaining is for many people but an excuse for ostentation.  For
others it is a means to an end; while a third variety apparently keep a
debit and credit account with their acquaintances—in books of double
entry, so that no errors may occur—and issue invitations like receipts,
only in return for value received.

We can rarely tell what is passing in the minds of people about us.  Some
of those mentioned above may feel a vague pleasure when their rooms are
filled with a chattering crowd of more or less well-assorted guests; if
that is denied them, can find consolation for the outlay in an indefinite
sensation of having performed a duty,—what duty, or to whom, they would,
however, find it difficult to define.

Let the novice flee from the allurements of such a host.  Old hands know
him and have got him on their list, escaping when escape is possible; for
he will mate the green youth with the red frump, or like a premature
millennium force the lion and the lamb to lie down together, and imagine
he has given unmixed pleasure to both.

One would expect that great worldly lights might learn by experience how
fatal bungled entertainments can be, but such is not the case.  Many
well-intentioned people continue sacrificing their friends on the altar
of hospitality year after year with never a qualm of conscience or a
sensation of pity for their victims.  One practical lady of my
acquaintance asks her guests alphabetically, commencing the season and
the first leaf of her visiting list simultaneously and working steadily
on through both to “finis.”  If you are an A, you will meet only A’s at
her table, with perhaps one or two B’s thrown in to fill up; you may sit
next to your mother-in-law for all the hostess cares.  She has probably
never heard that the number of guests at table should not exceed that of
the muses; or if by any chance she has heard it, does not care, and
considers such a rule old-fashioned and not appropriate to our improved
modern methods of entertaining.

One wonders what possible satisfaction a host can derive from providing
fifty people with unwholesome food and drink at a fixed date.  It is a
physical impossibility for him to have more than a passing word with his
guests, and ten to one the unaccustomed number has upset the internal
arrangements of his household, so that the dinner will, in consequence,
be poor and the service defective.

A side-light on this question came to me recently when an exceedingly
frank husband confided to a circle of his friends at the club the scheme
his wife, who, though on pleasure bent, was of a frugal mind, had adopted
to balance her social ledger.

“As we dine out constantly through the year,” remarked Benedict, “some
return is necessary.  So we wait until the height of the winter season,
when everybody is engaged two weeks in advance, then send out our
invitations at rather short notice for two or three consecutive dinners.
You’d be surprised,” he remarked, with a beaming smile, “what a number
refuse; last winter we cancelled all our obligations with two dinners,
the flowers and entrées being as fresh on the second evening as the
first!  It’s wonderful!” he remarked in conclusion, “how simple
entertaining becomes when one knows how!”  Which reminded me of an
ingenious youth I once heard telling some friends how easy he had found
it to write the book he had just published.  After his departure we
agreed that if he found it so easy it would not be worth our while to
read his volume.

Tender-hearted people generally make bad hosts.  They have a way of
collecting the morally lame, halt, and blind into their drawing-rooms
that gives those apartments the air of a convalescent home.  The moment a
couple have placed themselves beyond the social pale, these purblind
hosts conceive an affection for and lavish hospitality upon them.  If
such a host has been fortunate enough to get together a circle of healthy
people, you may feel confident that at the last moment a leper will be
introduced.  This class of entertainers fail to see that society cannot
he run on a philanthropic basis, and so insist on turning their salons
into hospitals.

It would take too long to enumerate the thousand idiosyncrasies of the
color-blind; few, however, are more amusing than those of the impulsive
gentlemen who invite people to their homes indiscriminately, because they
happen to feel in a good humor or chance to be seated next them at
another house,—invitations which the host regrets half an hour later, and
would willingly recall.  “I can’t think why I asked the So-and-sos!” he
will confide to you.  “I can’t abide them; they are as dull as the
dropsy!”  Many years ago in Paris, we used to call a certain hospitable
lady’s invitations “soup tickets,” so little individuality did they
possess.

The subtle laws of moral precedence are difficult reading for the most
intelligent, and therefore remain sealed books to the afflicted mortals
mentioned here.  The delicate tact that, with no apparent effort,
combines congenial elements into a delightful whole is lacking in their
composition.  The nice discrimination that presides over some households
is replaced by a jovial indifference to other persons’ feelings and
prejudices.

The idea of placing pretty Miss Débutante next young Strongboys instead
of giving her over into the clutches of old Mr. Boremore will never enter
these obtuse entertainers’ heads, any more than that of trying to keep
poor, defenceless Mrs. Mouse out of young Tom Cat’s claws.

It is useless to enumerate instances; people have suffered too severely
at the hands of careless and incompetent hosts not to know pretty well
what the title of this paper means.  So many of us have come away from
fruitless evenings, grinding our teeth, and vowing never to enter those
doors again while life lasts, that the time seems ripe for a protest.

If the color-blind would only refrain from painting, and the tone-deaf
not insist on inviting one to their concerts, the world would be a much
more agreeable place.  If people would only learn what they can and what
they can’t do, and leave the latter feats alone, a vast amount of
unnecessary annoyance would be avoided and the tiresome old grindstone
turn to a more cheerful tune.




CHAPTER 8—Idling in Mid-Ocean


To those fortunate mortals from whom Poseidon exacts no tribute in
crossing his broad domain, a transatlantic voyage must afford each year
an ever new delight.  The cares and worries of existence fade away and
disappear in company with the land, in the deep bosom of the ocean
buried.  One no longer feels like the bored mortal who has all winter
turned the millstone of work and pleasure, but seems to have
transmigrated into a new body, endowed with a ravenous appetite and
perfectly fresh sensations.

Perhaps it is only the novelty of the surroundings; but as I lie
somnolent in my chair, tucked into a corner of the white deck, watching
the jade-colored water rush past below, and the sea-gulls circle gayly
overhead, the _summum bonum_ of earthly contentment seems attained.  The
book chosen with care remains uncut; the sense of physical and mental
rest is too exquisite to be broken by any effort, even the reading of a
favorite author.

Drowsy lapses into unconsciousness obscure the senses, like the
transparent clouds that from time to time dim the sunlight.  A distant
bell in the wheel-house chimes the lazy half-hours.  Groups of people
come and go like figures on a lantern-slide.  A curiously detached
reeling makes the scene and the actors in it as unreal as a painted ship
manned by a shadowy crew.  The inevitable child tumbles on its face and
is picked up shrieking by tender parents; energetic youths organize games
of skill or discover whales on the horizon, without disturbing one’s
philosophic calm.

I congratulate myself on having chosen a foreign line.  For a week at
least no familiar name will be spoken, no accustomed face appear.  The
galling harness of routine is loosened; one breathes freely again
conscious of the unoccupied hours in perspective.

The welcome summons to luncheon comes as a pleasant shock.  Is it
possible that the morning has passed?  It seems to have but commenced.  I
rouse myself and descend to the cabin.  Toward the end of the meal a
rubicund Frenchman opposite makes the startling proposition that if I
wish to send a message home he will undertake to have it delivered.  It
is not until I notice the little square of oiled paper he is holding out
to me that I understand this reference to the “pigeon post” with which
the Compagnie Transatlantique is experimenting.  At the invitation of
this new acquaintance I ascend to the upper deck and watch his birds
depart.

The tiny bits of paper on which we have written (post-card fashion)
message and address are rolled two or three together, and inserted into a
piece of quill less than two inches long, which, however, they do not
entirely fill.  While a pigeon is held by one man, another pushes one of
the bird’s tail-feathers well through the quill, which is then fastened
in its place by two minute wooden wedges.  A moment later the pigeon is
tossed up into the air, and we witness the working of that mysterious
instinct which all our modern science leaves unexplained.  After a turn
or two far up in the clear sky, the bird gets its bearings and darts off
on its five-hundred-mile journey across unknown seas to an unseen land—a
voyage that no deviation or loitering will lengthen, and only fatigue or
accident interrupt, until he alights at his cote.

Five of these willing messengers were started the first day out, and five
more will leave to-morrow, poor little aërial postmen, almost predestined
to destruction (in the latter case), for we shall then be so far from
land that their one chance of life and home must depend on finding some
friendly mast where an hour’s rest may be taken before the bird starts
again on his journey.

In two or three days, according to the weather, we shall begin sending
French pigeons on ahead of us toward Havre.  The gentleman in charge of
them tells me that his wife received all the messages he sent to her
during his westward trip, the birds appearing each morning at her window
(where she was in the habit feeding them) with their tidings from
mid-ocean.  He also tells me that the French fleet in the Mediterranean
recently received messages from their comrades in the Baltic on the third
day by these feathered envoys.

It is hoped that in future ocean steamers will be able to keep up
communication with the land at least four out of the seven days of their
trips, so that, in case of delay or accident, their exact position and
circumstances can be made known at headquarters.  It is a pity, the
originator of the scheme remarked, that sea-gulls are such hopeless
vagabonds, for they can fly much greater distances than pigeons, and are
not affected by dampness, which seriously cripples the present
messengers.

Later in the day a compatriot, inspired doubtless by the morning’s
experiment, confided to me that he had hit on “a great scheme,” which he
intends to develop on arriving.  His idea is to domesticate families of
porpoises at Havre and New York, as that fish passes for having (like the
pigeon) the homing instinct.  Ships provided with the parent fish can
free one every twenty-four hours, charged with the morning’s mail.  The
inventor of this luminous idea has already designed the letter-boxes that
are to be strapped on the fishes’ backs, and decided on a neat uniform
for his postmen.

It is amusing during the first days “out” to watch the people whom chance
has thrown together into such close quarters.  The occult power that
impels a pigeon to seek its kind is feeble in comparison with the faculty
that travellers develop under these circumstances for seeking out
congenial spirits.  Twelve hours do not pass before affinities draw
together; what was apparently a homogeneous mass has by that time grouped
and arranged itself into three or four distinct circles.

The “sporty” gentlemen in loud clothes have united in the bonds of
friendship with the travelling agents and have chosen the smoking-room as
their headquarters.  No mellow sunset or serene moonlight will tempt
these comrades from the subtleties of poker; the pool on the run is the
event of their day.

A portly prima donna is the centre of another circle.  Her wraps, her
dogs, her admirers, and her brand-new husband (a handsome young Hungarian
with a voice like two Bacian bulls) fill the sitting-room, where the
piano gets but little rest.  Neither sunshine nor soft winds can draw
them to the deck.  Although too ill for the regular meals, this group eat
and drink during fifteen out of the twenty-four hours.

The deck, however, is not deserted; two fashionable dressmakers revel
there.  These sociable ladies asked the _commissaire_ at the start “to
introduce all the young unmarried men to them,” as they wanted to be
jolly.  They have a numerous court around them, and champagne, like the
conversation, flows freely.  These ladies have already become expert at
shuffleboard, but their “sea legs“ are not so good as might be expected,
and the dames require to be caught and supported by their admirers at
each moment to prevent them from tripping—an immense joke, to judge by
the peals of laughter that follow.

The American wife of a French ambassador sits on the captain’s right.  A
turn of the diplomatic wheel is taking the lady to Madrid, where her
position will call for supreme tact and self-restraint.  One feels a
thrill of national pride on looking at her high-bred young face and
listening as she chats in French and Spanish, and wonders once more at
the marvellous faculty our women have of adapting themselves so
graciously and so naturally to difficult positions, which the women of
other nations rarely fill well unless born to the purple.  It is the high
opinion I have of my countrywomen that has made me cavil, before now, on
seeing them turned into elaborately dressed nullities by foolish and too
adoring husbands.

The voyage is wearing itself away.  Sunny days are succeeded by gray
mornings, as exquisite in their way, when one can feel the ship fight
against contending wind and wave, and shiver under the blows received in
a struggle which dashes the salt spray high over the decks.  There is an
aroma in the air then that breathes new life into jaded nerves, and stirs
the drop of old Norse blood, dormant in most American veins, into
quivering ecstasy.  One dreams of throwing off the trammels of civilized
existence and returning to the free life of older days.

But here is Havre glittering in the distance against her background of
chalk cliffs.  People come on deck in strangely conventional clothes and
with demure citified airs.  Passengers of whose existence you were
unaware suddenly make their appearance.  Two friends meet near me for the
first time.  “Hallo, Jones!” says one of them, “are you crossing?”

“Yes,” answers Jones, “are you?”

The company’s tug has come alongside by this time, bringing its budget of
letters and telegrams.  The brief holiday is over.  With a sigh one comes
back to the positive and the present, and patiently resumes the harness
of life.




CHAPTER 9—“Climbers” in England


The expression “Little Englander,” much used of late to designate an
inhabitant of the Mother Isle in contra-distinction to other subjects of
Her Majesty, expresses neatly the feeling of our insular cousins not only
as regards ourselves, but also the position affected toward their
colonial brothers and sisters.

Have you ever noticed that in every circle there is some individual
assuming to do things better than his comrades—to know more, dress
better, run faster, pronounce more correctly?  Who, unless promptly
suppressed, will turn the conversation into a monologue relating to his
own exploits and opinions.  To differ is to bring down his contempt upon
your devoted head!  To argue is time wasted!

Human nature is, however, so constituted that a man of this type mostly
succeeds in hypnotizing his hearers into sharing his estimate of himself,
and impressing upon them the conviction that he is a rare being instead
of a commonplace mortal.  He is not a bad sort of person at bottom, and
ready to do one a friendly turn—if it does not entail too great
inconvenience.  In short, a good fellow, whose principal defect is the
profound conviction that he was born superior to the rest of mankind.

What this individual is to his environment, Englishmen are to the world
at large.  It is the misfortune, not the fault, of the rest of the human
race, that they are not native to his island; a fact, by the way, which
outsiders are rarely allowed to lose sight of, as it entails a becoming
modesty on their part.

Few idiosyncrasies get more quickly on American nerves or are further
from our hearty attitude toward strangers.  As we are far from looking
upon wandering Englishmen with suspicion, it takes us some time to
realize that Americans who cut away from their countrymen and settle far
from home are regarded with distrust and reluctantly received.  When a
family of this kind prepares to live in their neighborhood, Britons have
a formula of three questions they ask themselves concerning the
new-comers: “Whom do they know?  How much are they worth?” and “What
amusement (or profit) are we likely to get out of them?”  If the answer
to all or any of the three queries is satisfactory, my lord makes the
necessary advances and becomes an agreeable, if not a witty or original,
companion.

Given this and a number of other peculiarities, it seems curious that a
certain class of Americans should be so anxious to live in England.  What
is it tempts them?  It cannot be the climate, for that is vile; nor the
city of London, for it is one of the ugliest in existence; nor their
“cuisine”—for although we are not good cooks ourselves, we know what good
food is and could give Britons points.  Neither can it be art, nor the
opera,—one finds both better at home or on the Continent than in England.
So it must be society, and here one’s wonder deepens!

When I hear friends just back from a stay over there enlarging on the
charms of “country life,” or a London “season,” I look attentively to see
if they are in earnest, so incomparably dull have I always found English
house parties or town entertainments.  At least that side of society
which the climbing stranger mostly affects.  Other circles are charming,
if a bit slow, and the “Bohemia” and semi-Bohemia of London have a
delicate flavor of their own.

County society, that ideal life so attractive to American readers of
British novels, is, taken on the whole, the most insipid existence
conceivable.  The women lack the sparkle and charm of ours; the men, who
are out all day shooting or hunting according to the season, get back so
fagged that if they do not actually drop asleep at the dinner-table, they
will nap immediately after, brightening only when the ladies have
retired, when, with evening dress changed for comfortable smoking suits,
the hunters congregate in the billiard-room for cigars and brandy and
seltzer.

A particularly agreeable American woman, whose husband insists on going
every winter to Melton-Mowbray for the hunting, was describing the other
day the life there among the women, and expressing her wonder that those
who did not hunt could refrain from blowing out their brains, so awful
was the dulness and monotony!  She had ended by not dining out at all,
having discovered that the conversation never by any chance deviated far
from the knees of the horses and the height of the hedges!

Which reminds one of Thackeray relating how he had longed to know what
women talked about when they were alone after dinner, imagining it to be
on mysterious and thrilling subjects, until one evening he overheard such
a conversation and found it turned entirely on children and ailments!  As
regards wit, the English are like the Oriental potentate who at a ball in
Europe expressed his astonishment that the guests took the trouble to
dance and get themselves hot and dishevelled, explaining that in the East
he paid people to do that for him.  In England “amusers” are invited
expressly to be funny; anything uttered by one of these delightful
individuals is sure to be received with much laughter.  It is so simple
that way!  One is prepared and knows when to laugh.  Whereas amateur wit
is confusing.  When an American I knew, turning over the books on a
drawing-room table and finding Hare’s _Walks in London_, in two volumes,
said, “So you part your hair in the middle over here,” the remark was
received in silence, and with looks of polite surprise.

It is not necessary, however, to accumulate proofs that this much
described society is less intelligent than our own.  Their authors have
acknowledged it, and well they may.  For from Scott and Dickens down to
Hall Caine, American appreciation has gone far toward establishing the
reputation of English writers at home.

In spite of lack of humor and a thousand other defects which ought to
make English swelldom antagonistic to our countrymen, the fact remains
that “smart” London tempts a certain number of Americans and has become a
promised land, toward which they turn longing eyes.  You will always find
a few of these votaries over there in the “season,” struggling bravely up
the social current, making acquaintances, spending money at charity
sales, giving dinners and fêtes, taking houses at Ascot and filling them
with their new friends’ friends.  With more or less success as the
new-comers have been able to return satisfactory answers to the three
primary questions.

What Americans are these, who force us to blush for them infinitely more
than for the unlettered tourists trotting conscientiously around the
country, doing the sights and asking for soda-water and buckwheat cakes
at the hotels!

Any one who has been an observer of the genus “Climber” at home, and
wondered at their way and courage, will recognize these ambitious souls
abroad; five minutes’ conversation is enough.  It is never about a place
that they talk, but of the people they know.  London to them is not the
city of Dickens.  It is a place where one may meet the Prince of Wales
and perhaps obtain an entrance into his set.

One description will cover most climbers.  They are, as a rule, people
who start humbly in some small city, then when fortune comes, push on to
New York and Newport, where they carry all before them and make their
houses centres and themselves powers.  Next comes the discovery that the
circle into which they have forced their way is not nearly as attractive
as it appeared from a distance.  Consequently that vague disappointment
is felt which most of us experience on attaining a long desired goal—the
unsatisfactoriness of success!  Much the same sensation as caused poor Du
Maurier to answer, when asked shortly before his death why he looked so
glum, “I’m soured by success!”

So true is this of all human nature that the following recipe might be
given for the attainment of perfect happiness: “Begin far down in any
walk of life.  Rise by your efforts higher each year, and then be careful
to die before discovering that there is nothing at the top.  The
excitement of the struggle—‘the rapture of the chase’—are greater joys
than achievement.”

Our ambitious friends naturally ignore this bit of philosophy.  When it
is discovered that the “world” at home has given but an unsatisfactory
return for cash and conniving, it occurs to them that the fault lies in
the circle, and they assume that their particular talents require a
larger field.  Having conquered all in sight, these social Alexanders
pine for a new world, which generally turns out to be the “Old,” so a
crossing is made, and the “Conquest of England” begun with all the
enthusiasm and push employed on starting out from the little native city
twenty years before.

It is in Victoria’s realm that foemen worthy of their steel await the
conquerors.  Home society was a too easy prey, opening its doors and
laying down its arms at the first summons.  In England the new-comers
find that their little game has been played before; and, well, what they
imagined was a discovery proves to be a long-studied science with
“_donnant_! _donnant_!” as its fundamental law.  Wily opponents with
trump cards in their hands and a profound knowledge of “Hoyle” smilingly
offer them seats.  Having acquired in a home game a knowledge of “bluff,”
our friends plunge with delight into the fray, only to find English
society so formed that, climb they never so wisely, the top can never be
reached.  Work as hard as they may, succeed even beyond their fondest
hopes, there will always remain circles above, toward which to
yearn—people who will refuse to know them, houses they will never be
invited to enter.  Think of the charm, the attraction such a civilization
must have for the real born climber, and you, my reader, will understand
why certain of our compatriots enjoy living in England, and why when once
the intoxicating draught (supplied to the ambitious on the other side)
has been tasted, all home concoctions prove insipid.




CHAPTER 10—_Calvé_ at Cabrières


While I was making a “cure” last year at Lamalou, an obscure Spa in the
Cevennes Mountains, Madame Calvé, to whom I had expressed a desire to see
her picturesque home, telegraphed an invitation to pass the day with her,
naming the train she could meet, which would allow for the long drive to
her château before luncheon.  It is needless to say the invitation was
accepted.  As my train drew up at the little station, Madame Calvé, in
her trap, was the first person I saw, and no time was lost in getting _en
route_.

During the hour passed on the poplar-bordered road that leads straight
and white across the country I had time to appreciate the transformation
in the woman at my side.  Was this gray-clad, nunlike figure the
passionate, sensuous Carmen of Bizet’s masterpiece?  Could that calm,
pale face, crossed by innumerable lines of suffering, as a spider’s web
lies on a flower, blaze and pant with Sappho’s guilty love?

Something of these thoughts must have appeared on my face, for turning
with a smile, she asked, “You find me changed?  It’s the air of my
village.  Here I’m myself.  Everywhere else I’m different.  On the stage
I am any part I may be playing, but am never really happy away from my
hill there.”  As she spoke, a sun-baked hamlet came in sight, huddled
around the base of two tall towers that rose cool and gray in the noonday
heat.

“All that wing,” she added, “is arranged for the convalescent girls whom
I have sent down to me from the Paris hospitals for a cure of fresh air
and simple food.  Six years ago, just after I had bought this place, a
series of operations became necessary which left me prostrated and
anæmic.  No tonics were of benefit.  I grew weaker day by day, until the
doctors began to despair of my life.  Finally, at the advice of an old
woman here who passes for being something of a curer, I tried the
experiment or lying five or six hours a day motionless in the sunlight.
It wasn’t long before I felt life creeping back to my poor feeble body.
The hot sun of our magic south was a more subtle tonic than any drug.
When the cure was complete, I made up my mind that each summer the same
chance should be offered to as many of my suffering sisters as this old
place could be made to accommodate.”

The bells on the shaggy Tarbes ponies she was driving along the Languedoc
road drew, on nearing her residence, a number of peasant children from
their play.

As the ruddy urchins ran shouting around our carriage wheels and
scrambled in the dust for the sous we threw them, my hostess pointed
laughing to a scrubby little girl with tomato-colored cheeks and tousled
dark hair, remarking, “I looked like that twenty years ago and performed
just those antics on this very road.  No punishment would keep me off the
highway.  Those pennies, if I’m not mistaken, will all be spent at the
village pastry cook’s within an hour.”

This was said with such a tender glance at the children that one realized
the great artist was at home here, surrounded by the people she loved and
understood.  True to the “homing” instinct of the French peasant, Madame
Calvé, when fortune came to her, bought and partially restored the
rambling château which at sunset casts its shadow across the village of
her birth.  Since that day every moment of freedom from professional
labor and every penny of her large income are spent at Cabrières,
building, planning, even farming, when her health permits.

“I think,” she continued, as we approached the château, “that the
happiest day of my life—and I have, as you know, passed some hours worth
living, both on and off the stage—was when, that wing completed, a Paris
train brought the first occupants for my twenty little bedrooms; no words
can tell the delight it gives me now to see the color coming back to my
patients’ pale lips and hear them laughing and singing about the place.
As I am always short of funds, the idea of abandoning this work is the
only fear the future holds for me.”

With the vivacity peculiar to her character, my companion then whipped up
her cobs and turned the conversation into gayer channels.  Five minutes
later we clattered over a drawbridge and drew up in a roomy courtyard,
half blinding sunlight and half blue shadow, where a score of girls were
occupied with books and sewing.

The luncheon bell was ringing as we ascended the terrace steps.  After a
hurried five minutes for brushing and washing, we took our places at a
long table set in the cool stone hall, guests stopping in the château
occupying one end around the chatelaine, the convalescents filling the
other seats.

Those who have only seen the capricious diva on the stage or in Parisian
salons can form little idea of the proprietress of Cabrières.  No shade
of coquetry blurs the clear picture of her home life.  The capped and
saboted peasant women who waited on us were not more simple in their
ways.  Several times during the meal she left her seat to inquire after
the comfort of some invalid girl or inspect the cooking in the adjacent
kitchen.  These wanderings were not, however, allowed to disturb the
conversation, which flowed on after the mellow French fashion, enlivened
by much wit and gay badinage.  One of our hostess’s anecdotes at her own
expense was especially amusing.

“When in Venice,” she told us, “most prima donnas are carried to and from
the opera in sedan chairs to avoid the risk of colds from the draughty
gondolas.  The last night of my initial season there, I was informed, as
the curtain fell, that a number of Venetian nobles were planning to carry
me in triumph to the hotel.  When I descended from my dressing-room the
courtyard of the theatre was filled with men in dress clothes, bearing
lanterns, who caught up the chair as soon as I was seated and carried it
noisily across the city to the hotel.  Much moved by this unusual honor,
I mounted to the balcony of my room, from which elevation I bowed my
thanks, and threw all the flowers at hand to my escort.

“Next morning the hotel proprietor appeared with my coffee, and after
hesitating a moment, remarked: ‘Well, we made a success of it last night.
It has been telegraphed to all the capitals of Europe!  I hope you will
not think a thousand francs too much, considering the advertisement!’  In
blank amazement, I asked what he meant.  ‘I mean the triumphal progress,’
he answered.  ‘I thought you understood!  We always organize one for the
“stars” who visit Venice.  The men who carried your chair last night were
the waiters from the hotels.  We hire them on account of their dress
clothes’!  Think of the disillusion,” added Calvé, laughing, “and my
disgust, when I thought of myself naïvely throwing kisses and flowers to
a group of Swiss garçons at fifteen francs a head.  There was nothing to
do, however, but pay the bill and swallow my chagrin!”

How many pretty women do you suppose would tell such a joke upon
themselves?  Another story she told us is characteristic of her peasant
neighbors.

“When I came back here after my first season in St. Petersburg and London
the _curé_ requested me to sing at our local fête.  I gladly consented,
and, standing by his side on the steps of the _Mairie_, gave the great
aria from the _Huguenots_ in my best manner.  To my astonishment the
performance was received in complete silence.  ‘Poor Calvé,’ I heard an
old friend of my mother’s murmur.  ‘Her voice used to be so nice, and now
it’s all gone!’  Taking in the situation at a glance, I threw my voice
well up into my nose and started off on a well-known provincial song, in
the shrill falsetto of our peasant women.  The effect was instantaneous!
Long before the end the performance was drowned in thunders of applause.
Which proves that to be popular a singer must adapt herself to her
audience.”

Luncheon over, we repaired for cigarettes and coffee to an upper room,
where Calvé was giving Dagnan-Bouveret some sittings for a portrait, and
lingered there until four o’clock, when our hostess left us for her
siesta, and a “break” took those who cared for the excursion across the
valley to inspect the ruins of a Roman bath.  A late dinner brought us
together again in a small dining room, the convalescents having eaten
their simple meal and disappeared an hour before.  During this time,
another transformation had taken place in our mercurial hostess!  It was
the Calvé of Paris, Calvé the witch, Calvé the _capiteuse_, who presided
at the dainty, flower-decked table and led the laughing conversation.

A few notes struck on a guitar by one of the party, as we sat an hour
later on the moonlit terrace, were enough to start off the versatile
artist, who was in her gayest humor.  She sang us stray bits of opera,
alternating her music with scenes burlesqued from recent plays.  No one
escaped her inimitable mimicry, not even the “divine Sarah,” Calvé giving
us an unpayable impersonation of the elderly _tragédienne_ as
Lorenzaccio, the boy hero of Alfred de Musset’s drama.  Burlesquing led
to her dancing some Spanish steps with an abandon never attempted on the
stage!  Which in turn gave place to an imitation of an American whistling
an air from _Carmen_, and some “coon songs” she had picked up during her
stay at New York.  They, again, were succeeded by a superb rendering of
the imprecation from Racine’s _Camille_, which made her audience realize
that in gaining a soprano the world has lost, perhaps, its greatest
_tragédienne_.

At eleven o’clock the clatter of hoofs in the court warned us that the
pleasant evening had come to an end.  A journalist _en route_ for Paris
was soon installed with me in the little omnibus that was to take us to
the station, Calvé herself lighting our cigars and providing the wraps
that were to keep out the cool night air.

As we passed under the low archway of the entrance amid a clamor of
“adieu“ and “au revoir,” the young Frenchman at my side pointed up to a
row of closed windows overhead.  “Isn’t it a lesson,” he said, “for all
of us, to think of the occupants of those little rooms, whom the
generosity and care of that gracious artist are leaning by such pleasant
paths back to health and courage for their toilsome lives?”




CHAPTER 11—A Cry For Fresh Air


“Once upon a time,” reads the familiar nursery tale, while the fairies,
invited by a king and queen to the christening of their daughter, were
showering good gifts on the baby princess, a disgruntled old witch, whom
no one had thought of asking to the ceremony, appeared uninvited on the
scene and revenged herself by decreeing that the presents of the good
fairies, instead of proving beneficial, should bring only trouble and
embarrassment to the royal infant.

A telling analogy might be drawn between that unhappy princess over whose
fate so many youthful tears have been shed, and the condition of our
invention-ridden country; for we see every day how the good gifts of
those nineteenth century fairies, Science and Industry, instead of
proving blessings to mankind, are being turned by ignorance and stupidity
into veritable afflictions.

If a prophetic gentleman had told Louis Fourteenth’s shivering
courtiers—whom an iron etiquette forced on winter mornings into the
(appropriately named) Galerie des Glaces, stamping their silk-clad feet
and blowing on their blue fingers, until the king should appear—that
within a century and a half one simple discovery would enable all classes
of people to keep their shops and dwellings at a summer temperature
through the severest winters, the half-frozen nobles would have flouted
the suggestion as an “iridescent dream,” a sort of too-good-to-be-true
prophecy.

What was to those noblemen an unheard-of luxury has become within the
last decade one of the primary necessities of our life.

The question arises now: Are we gainers by the change?  Has the
indiscriminate use of heat been of advantage, either mentally or
physically, to the nation?

The incubus of caloric that sits on our gasping country is particularly
painful at this season, when nature undertakes to do her own heating.

In other less-favored lands, the first spring days, the exquisite
awakening of the world after a long winter, bring to the inhabitants a
sensation of joy and renewed vitality.  We, however, have discounted that
enjoyment.  Delicate gradations of temperature are lost on people who
have been stewing for six months in a mixture of steam and twice-breathed
air.

What pleasure can an early April day afford the man who has slept in an
overheated flat and is hurrying to an office where eighty degrees is the
average all the year round?  Or the pale shop-girl, who complains if a
breath of morning air strays into the suburban train where she is seated?

As people who habitually use such “relishes” as Chutney and
Worcestershire are incapable of appreciating delicately prepared food, so
the ”soft” mortals who have accustomed themselves to a perpetual August
are insensible to fine shadings of temperature.

The other day I went with a friend to inspect some rooms he had been
decorating in one of our public schools.  The morning had been frosty,
but by eleven o’clock the sun warmed the air uncomfortably.  On entering
the school we were met by a blast of heated air that was positively
staggering.  In the recitation rooms, where, as in all New York
schoolrooms, the children were packed like dominoes in a box, the
temperature could not have been under eighty-five.

The pale, spectacled spinster in charge, to whom we complained of this,
was astonished and offended at what she considered our interference, and
answered that “the children liked it warm,” as for herself she “had a
cold and could not think of opening a window.”  If the rooms were too
warm it was the janitor’s fault, and he had gone out!

Twelve o’clock struck before we had finished our tour of inspection.  It
is to be doubted if anywhere else in the world could there be found such
a procession of pasty-faced, dull-eyed youngsters as trooped past us down
the stairs.  Their appearance was the natural result of compelling
children dressed for winter weather to sit many hours each day in
hothouses, more suited to tropical plants than to growing human beings.

A gentleman with us remarked with a sigh, “I have been in almost every
school in the city and find the same condition everywhere.  It is
terrible, but there doesn’t seem to be any remedy for it.”  The taste for
living in a red-hot atmosphere is growing on our people; even public
vehicles have to be heated now to please the patrons.

When tiresome old Benjamin Franklin made stoves popular he struck a
terrible blow at the health of his compatriots; the introduction of steam
heat and consequent suppression of all health-giving ventilation did the
rest; the rosy cheeks of American children went up the chimney with the
last whiff of wood smoke, and have never returned.  Much of our home life
followed; no family can be expected to gather in cheerful converse around
a “radiator.”

How can this horror of fresh air among us be explained?  If people really
enjoy living in overheated rooms with little or no ventilation, why is it
that we hear so much complaining, when during the summer months the
thermometer runs up into the familiar nineties?  Why are children hurried
out of town, and why do wives consider it a necessity to desert their
husbands?

It’s rather inconsistent, to say the least, for not one of those
deserters but would “kick” if the theatre or church they attend fell
below that temperature in December.

It is impossible to go into our banks and offices and not realize that
the air has been breathed again and again, heated and cooled, but never
changed,—doors and windows fit too tightly for that.

The pallor and dazed expression of the employees tell the same tale.  I
spoke to a youth the other day in an office about his appearance and
asked if he was ill.  “Yes,” he answered, “I have had a succession of
colds all winter.  You see, my desk here is next to the radiator, so I am
in a perpetual perspiration and catch cold as soon as I go out.  Last
winter I passed three months in a farmhouse, where the water froze in my
room at night, and we had to wear overcoats to our meals.  Yet I never
had a cold there, and gained in weight and strength.”

Twenty years ago no “palatial private residence” was considered complete
unless there was a stationary washstand (forming a direct connection with
the sewer) in each bedroom.  We looked pityingly on foreigners who did
not enjoy these advantages, until one day we realized that the latter
were in the right, and straightway stationary washstands disappeared.

How much time must pass and how many victims be sacrificed before we come
to our senses on the great radiator question?

As a result of our population living in a furnace, it happens now that
when you rebel on being forced to take an impromptu Turkish bath at a
theatre, the usher answers your complaint with “It can’t be as warm as
you think, for a lady over there has just told me she felt chilly and
asked for more heat!”

Another invention of the enemy is the “revolving door.”  By this
ingenious contrivance the little fresh air that formerly crept into a
building is now excluded.  Which explains why on entering our larger
hotels one is taken by the throat, as it were, by a sickening long-dead
atmosphere—in which the souvenir of past meals and decaying flowers
floats like a regret—such as explorers must find on opening an Egyptian
tomb.

Absurd as it may seem, it has become a distinction to have cool rooms.
Alas, they are rare!  Those blessed households where one has the
delicious sensation of being chilly and can turn with pleasure toward
crackling wood!  The open fire has become, within the last decade, a test
of refinement, almost a question of good breeding, forming a broad
distinction between dainty households and vulgar ones, and marking the
line which separates the homes of cultivated people from the parlors of
those who care only for display.

A drawing-room filled with heat, the source of which remains invisible,
is as characteristic of the parvenu as clanking chains on a harness or
fine clothes worn in the street.

An open fire is the “eye” of a room, which can no more be attractive
without it than the human face can be beautiful if it lacks the visual
organs.  The “gas fire” bears about the same relation to the real thing
as a glass eye does to a natural one, and produces much the same
sensation.  Artificial eyes are painful necessities in some cases, and
therefore cannot be condemned; but the household which gathers
complacently around a “gas log” must have something radically wrong with
it, and would be capable of worse offences against taste and hospitality.

There is a tombstone in a New England grave-yard the inscription on which
reads: “I was well, I wanted to be better.  Here I am.”

As regards heating of our houses, it’s to be feared that we have gone
much the same road as the unfortunate New Englander.  I don’t mean to
imply that he is now suffering from too much heat, but we, as a nation,
certainly are.

Janitors and parlor-car conductors have replaced the wicked fairies of
other days, but are apparently animated by their malignant spirit, and
employ their hours of brief authority as cruelly.  No witch dancing
around her boiling cauldron was ever more joyful than the fireman of a
modern hotel, as he gleefully turns more and more steam upon his helpless
victims.  Long acquaintance with that gentleman has convinced me that he
cannot plead ignorance as an excuse for falling into these excesses.  It
is pure, unadulterated perversity, else why should he invariably choose
the mildest mornings to show what his engines can do?

Many explanations have been offered for this love of a high temperature
by our compatriots.  Perhaps the true one has not yet been found.  Is it
not possible that what appears to be folly and almost criminal negligence
of the rules of health, may be, after all, only a commendable ambition to
renew the exploits of those biblical heroes, Shadrach, Meshach, and
Abednego?




CHAPTER 12—The Paris of our Grandparents


We are apt to fall into the error of assuming that only American cities
have displaced their centres and changed their appearance during the last
half-century.

The “oldest inhabitant,” with his twice-told tales of transformations and
changes, is to a certain extent responsible for this; by contrast, we
imagine that the capitals of Europe have always been just as we see them.
So strong is this impression that it requires a serious effort of the
imagination to reconstruct the Paris that our grandparents knew and
admired, few as the years are that separate their day from ours.

It is, for instance, difficult to conceive of a Paris that ended at the
rue Royale, with only waste land and market gardens beyond the Madeleine,
where to-day so many avenues open their stately perspectives; yet such
was the case!  The few fine residences that existed beyond that point
faced the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, with gardens running back to an unkempt
open country called the Champs Elysées, where an unfinished Arc de
Triomphe stood alone in a wilderness that no one ever dreamed of
traversing.

The fashionable ladies of that time drove in the afternoon along the
boulevards from the Madeleine to the Château d’Eau, and stopped their
ponderous yellow barouches at Tortoni’s, where ices were served to them
in their carriages, while they chatted with immaculate dandies in
skin-tight nankeen unmentionables, blue swallow-tailed coats, and furry
‘beaver” hats.

While looking over some books in the company of an old lady who from time
to time opens her store of treasures and recalls her remote youth at my
request, and whose _spirituel_ and graphic language gives to her
souvenirs the air of being stray chapters from some old-fashioned
romance, I received a vivid impression of how the French capital must
have looked fifty years ago.

Emptying in her company a chest of books that had not seen the light for
several decades, we came across a “Panorama of the Boulevards,” dated
1845, which proved when unfolded to be a colored lithograph, a couple of
yards long by five or six inches high, representing the line of
boulevards from the Madeleine to the Place de la Bastille.  Each house,
almost each tree, was faithfully depicted, together with the crowds on
the sidewalks and the carriages in the street.  The whole scene was as
different from the effect made by that thoroughfare to-day as though five
hundred and not fifty years had elapsed since the little book was
printed.  The picture breathed an atmosphere of calm and nameless
quaintness that one finds now only in old provincial cities which have
escaped the ravages of improvement.

My companion sat with the book unfolded before her, in a smiling trance.
Her mind had turned back to the far-away days when she first trod those
streets a bride, with all the pleasures and few of the cares of life to
think about.

I watched her in silence (it seemed a sacrilege to break in on such a
train of thought), until gradually her eyes lost their far-away
expression, and, turning to me with a smile, she exclaimed: “How we ever
had the courage to appear in the street dressed as we were is a mystery!
Do you see that carriage?” pointing in the print to a high-swung family
vehicle with a powdered coachman on the box, and two sky-blue lackeys
standing behind.  “I can remember, as if it were yesterday, going to
drive with Lady B-, the British ambassadress, in just such a conveyance.
She drove four horses with feathers on their heads, when she used to come
to Meurice’s for me.  I blush when I think that my frock was so scant
that I had to raise the skirt almost to my knees in order to get into her
carriage.

“Why we didn’t all die of pneumonia is another marvel, for we wore
low-necked dresses and the thinnest of slippers in the street, our heads
being about the only part that was completely covered.  I was
particularly proud of a turban surmounted with a bird of paradise, but
Lady B--- affected poke bonnets, then just coming into fashion, so large
and so deep that when one looked at her from the side nothing was visible
except two curls, ‘as damp and as black as leeches.’  In other ways our
toilets were absurdly unsuited for every-day wear; we wore light scarves
over our necks, and rarely used furlined pelisses.”

Returning to an examination of the panorama, my companion pointed out to
me that there was no break in the boulevards, where the opera-house, with
its seven radiating avenues, now stands, but a long line of Hôtels,
dozing behind high walls, and quaint two-storied buildings that
undoubtedly dated from the razing of the city wall and the opening of the
new thoroughfare under Louis XV.

A little farther on was the world-famous Maison Dorée, where one almost
expected to see Alfred de Musset and le docteur Véron dining with Dumas
and Eugene Sue.

“What in the name of goodness is that?” I exclaimed, pointing to a couple
of black and yellow monstrosities on wheels, which looked like three
carriages joined together with a “buggy” added on in front.

“That’s the diligence just arrived from Calais; it has been two days _en
route_, the passengers sleeping as best they could, side by side, and
escaping from their confinement only when horses were changed or while
stopping for meals.  That high two-wheeled trap with the little ‘tiger’
standing up behind is a tilbury.  We used to see the Count d’Orsay
driving one like that almost every day.  He wore butter-colored gloves,
and the skirts of his coat were pleated full all around, and stood out
like a ballet girl’s.  It is a pity they have not included Louis Philippe
and his family jogging off to Neuilly in the court ‘carryall,’—the
‘Citizen King,’ with his blue umbrella between his knees, trying to look
like an honest bourgeois, and failing even in that attempt to please the
Parisians.

“We were in Paris in ’48; from my window at Meurice’s I saw poor old
_Juste Milieu_ read his abdication from the historic middle balcony of
the Tuileries, and half an hour later we perceived the Duchesse d’Orléans
leave the Tuileries on foot, leading her two sons by the hand, and walk
through the gardens and across the Place de la Concorde to the Corps
Législatif, in a last attempt to save the crown for her son.  Futile
effort!  That evening the ‘Citizen King’ was hurried through those same
gardens and into a passing cab, _en route_ for a life exile.

“Our balcony at Meurice’s was a fine point of observation from which to
watch a revolution.  With an opera-glass we could see the mob surging to
the sack of the palace, the priceless furniture and bric-à-brac flung
into the street, court dresses waved on pikes from the tall windows, and
finally the throne brought out, and carried off to be burned.  There was
no keeping the men of our party in after that.  They rushed off to have a
nearer glimpse of the fighting, and we saw no more of them until daybreak
the following morning when, just as we were preparing to send for the
police, two dilapidated, ragged, black-faced mortals appeared, in whom we
barely recognized our husbands.  They had been impressed into service and
passed their night building barricades.  My better half, however, had
succeeded in snatching a handful of the gold fringe from the throne as it
was carried by, an act of prowess that repaid him for all his troubles
and fatigue.

“I passed the greater part of forty-eight hours on our balcony, watching
the mob marching by, singing _La Marseillaise_, and camping at night in
the streets.  It was all I could do to tear myself away from the window
long enough to eat and write in my journal.

“There was no Avenue de l’Opéra then.  The trip from the boulevards to
the Palais-Royal had to be made by a long detour across the Place Vendôme
(where, by the bye, a cattle market was held) or through a labyrinth of
narrow, bad-smelling little streets, where strangers easily lost their
way.  Next to the boulevards, the Palais-Royal was the centre of the
elegant and dissipated life in the capital.  It was there we met of an
afternoon to drink chocolate at the ‘Rotonde,’ or to dine at ‘Les Trois
Frères Provençaux,’ and let our husbands have a try at the gambling
tables in the Passage d’Orléans.

“No one thought of buying jewelry anywhere else.  It was from the windows
of its shops that the fashions started on their way around the world.
When Victoria as a bride was visiting Louis Philippe, she was so
fascinated by the aspect of the place that the gallant French king
ordered a miniature copy of the scene, made _in papier-mâché_, as a
present for his guest, a sort of gigantic dolls’ house in which not only
the palace and its long colonnades were reproduced, but every tiny shop
and the myriad articles for sale were copied with Chinese fidelity.
Unfortunately the pear-headed old king became England’s uninvited guest
before this clumsy toy was finished, so it never crossed the Channel, but
can be seen to-day by any one curious enough to examine it, in the Musée
Carnavalet.

“Few of us realize that the Paris of Charles X. and Louis Philippe would
seem to us now a small, ill-paved, and worse-lighted provincial town,
with few theatres or hotels, communicating with the outer world only by
means of a horse-drawn ‘post,’ and practically farther from London than
Constantinople is to-day.  One feels this isolation in the literature of
the time; brilliant as the epoch was, the horizon of its writers was
bounded by the boulevards and the Faubourg Saint-Germain.”

Dumas says laughingly, in a letter to a friend: “I have never ventured
into the unexplored country beyond the Bastille, but am convinced that it
shelters wild animals and savages.”  The wit and brains of the period
were concentrated into a small space.  Money-making had no more part in
the programme of a writer then than an introduction into “society.”
Catering to a foreign market and snobbishness were undreamed-of
degradations.  Paris had not yet been turned into the _Foire du Monde_
that she has since become, with whole quarters given over to the use of
foreigners,—theatres, restaurants, and hotels created only for the use of
a polyglot population that could give lessons to the people around
Babel’s famous “tower.”




CHAPTER 13—Some American Husbands


Until the beginning of this century men played the _beau rôle_ in life’s
comedy.  As in the rest of the animal world, our males were the brilliant
members of the community, flaunting their gaudy plumage at home and
abroad, while the women-folk remained in seclusion, tending their
children, directing the servants, or ministering to their lords’ comfort.

In those happy days the husband ruled supreme at his own fireside,
receiving the homage of the family, who bent to his will and obeyed his
orders.

During the last century, however, the “part” of better half has become
less and less attractive in America, one prerogative after another having
been whisked away by enterprising wives.  Modern Delilahs have yearly
snipped off more and more of Samson’s luxuriant curls, and added those
ornaments to their own _coiffures_, until in the majority of families the
husband finds himself reduced to a state of bondage compared with which
the biblical hero enjoyed a pampered idleness.  Times have indeed changed
in America since the native chief sat in dignified repose bedizened with
all the finery at hand, while the ladies of the family waited tremblingly
upon him.  To-day it is the American husband who turns the grindstone all
the year round, and it is his pretty tyrant who enjoys the elegant
leisure that a century ago was considered a masculine luxury.

To America must be given the credit of having produced the model husband,
a new species, as it were, of the _genus homo_.

In no rôle does a compatriot appear to such advantage as in that of
Benedict.  As a boy he is often too advanced for his years or his
information; in youth he is conspicuous neither for his culture nor his
unselfishness.  But once in matrimonial harness this untrained animal
becomes bridle-wise with surprising rapidity, and will for the rest of
life go through his paces, waltzing, kneeing, and saluting with hardly a
touch of the whip.  Whether this is the result of superior
horse-womanship on the part of American wives or a trait peculiar to sons
of “Uncle Sam,” is hard to say, but the fact is self-evident to any
observer that our fair equestrians rarely meet with a rebellious mount.

Any one who has studied marital ways in other lands will realize that in
no country have the men effaced themselves so gracefully as with us.  In
this respect no foreign production can compare for a moment with the
domestic article.  In English, French, and German families the husband is
still all-powerful.  The house is mounted, guests are asked, and the year
planned out to suit his occupations and pleasure.  Here papa is rarely
consulted until such matters have been decided upon by the ladies, when
the head of the house is called in to sign the checks.

I have had occasion more than once to bewail the shortcomings of the
American man, and so take pleasure in pointing out the modesty and good
temper with which he fills this role.  He is trained from the beginning
to give all and expect nothing in return, an American girl rarely
bringing any _dot_ to her husband, no matter how wealthy her family may
be.  If, as occasionally happens, an income is allowed a bride by her
parents, she expects to spend it on her toilets or pleasures.  This
condition of the matrimonial market exists in no other country; even in
England, where _mariages de convenance_ are rare, “settlements” form an
inevitable prelude to conjugal bliss.

The fact that she contributes little or nothing to the common income in
no way embarrasses an American wife; her pretensions are usually in an
inverse proportion to her personal means.  A man I knew some years ago
deliberately chose his bride from an impecunious family (in the hope that
her simple surroundings had inculcated homely taste), and announced to an
incredulous circle of friends, at his last bachelor dinner, that he
intended, in future, to pass his evenings at his fireside, between his
book and his pretty spouse.  Poor, innocent, confiding mortal!  The wife
quickly became a belle of the fastest set in town.  Having had more than
she wanted of firesides and quiet evenings before her marriage, her idea
was to go about as much as possible, and, when not so occupied, to fill
her house with company.  It may be laid down as a maxim in this
connection that a man marries to obtain a home, and a girl to get away
from one; hence disappointment on both sides.

The couple in question have in all probability not passed an evening
alone since they were married, the lady rarely stopping in the round of
her gayeties until she collapses from fatigue.  Their home is typical of
their life, which itself can be taken as a good example of the existence
that most of our “smart” people lead.  The ground floor and the first
floor are given up to entertaining.  The second is occupied by the
spacious sitting, bath, and sleeping rooms of the lady.  A ten-by-twelve
chamber suffices for my lord, and the only den he can rightly call his
own is a small room near the front door, about as private as the
sidewalk, which is turned into a cloak-room whenever the couple receive,
making it impossible to keep books or papers of value there, or even to
use it as a smoking-room after dinner, so his men guests sit around the
dismantled dining-table while the ladies are enjoying a suite of parlors
above.

At first the idea of such an unequal division of the house shocks our
sense of justice, until we reflect that the American husband is not
expected to remain at home.  That’s not his place!  If he is not down
town making money, fashion dictates that he must be at some club-house
playing a game.  A man who should remain at home, and read or chat with
the ladies of his family, would be considered a bore and unmanly.  There
seems to be no place in an American house for its head.  More than once
when the friend I have referred to has asked me, at the club, to dine
informally with him, we have found, on arriving, that Madame, having an
evening off, had gone to bed and forgotten to order any dinner, so we
were obliged to return to the club for our meal.  When, however, his wife
is in good health, she expects her weary husband to accompany her to
dinner, opera, or ball, night after night, oblivious of the work the
morrow holds in store for him.

In one family I know, paterfamilias goes by the name of the “purse.”  The
more one sees of American households the more appropriate that name
appears.  Everything is expected of the husband, and he is accorded no
definite place in return.  He leaves the house at 8.30.  When he returns,
at five, if his wife is entertaining a man at tea, it would be considered
the height of indelicacy for him to intrude upon them, for his arrival
would cast a chill on the conversation.  When a couple dine out, the
husband is always _la bête noire_ of the hostess, no woman wanting to sit
next to a married man, if she can help it.

The few Benedicts who have had the courage to break away from these
conditions and amuse themselves with yachts, salmon rivers, or
“grass-bachelor” trips to Europe, while secretly admired by the women,
are frowned upon in society as dangerous examples, likely to sow the
seeds of discontent among their comrades; although it is the commonest
thing in the world for an American wife to take the children and go
abroad on a tour.

Imagine a German or Italian wife announcing to her spouse that she had
decided to run over to England for a year with her children, that they
might learn English.  The mind recoils in horror from the idea of the
catastrophe that would ensue.

Glance around a ball-room, a dinner party, or the opera, if you have any
doubts as to the unselfishness of our married men.  How many of them do
you suppose are present for their own pleasure?  The owner of an opera
box rarely retains a seat in his expensive quarters.  You generally find
him idling in the lobbies looking at his watch, or repairing to a
neighboring concert hall to pass the weary hours.  At a ball it is even
worse.  One wonders why card-rooms are not provided at large balls (as is
the custom abroad), where the bored husbands might find a little solace
over “bridge,” instead of yawning in the coat-room or making desperate
signs to their wives from the doorway,—signals of distress, by the bye,
that rarely produce any effect.

It is the rebellious husband who is admired and courted, however.  A
curious trait of human nature compels admiration for whatever is harmful,
and forces us, in spite of our better judgment, to depreciate the useful
and beneficent.  The coats-of-arms of all countries are crowded with
eagles and lions, that never yet did any good, living or dead; orators
enlarge on the fine qualities of these birds and beasts, and hold them up
as models, while using as terms of reproach the name of the goose or the
cow, creatures that minister in a hundred ways to our wants.  Such a
spirit has brought helpful, productive “better halves” to the humble
place they now occupy in the eyes of our people.

As long as men passed their time in fighting and carousing they were
heroes; as soon as they became patient bread-winners all the romance
evaporated from their atmosphere.  The Jewish Hercules had his revenge in
the end and made things disagreeable for his tormentors.  So far,
however, there are no signs of a revolt among the shorn lambs in this
country.  They patiently bend their necks to the collar—the kindest, most
loving and devoted helpmates that ever plodded under the matrimonial
yoke.

When in the East, one watches with admiration the part a donkey plays in
the economy of those primitive lands.  All the work is reserved for that
industrious animal, and little play falls to his share.  The camel is
always bad-tempered, and when overladen lies down, refusing to move until
relieved of its burden.  The Turk is lazy and selfish, the native women
pass their time in chattering and giggling, the children play and
squabble, the ubiquitous dog sleeps in the sun; but from daybreak to
midnight the little mouse-colored donkeys toil unceasingly.  All burdens
too bulky or too cumbersome for man are put on his back; the provender
which horses and camels have refused becomes his portion; he is the first
to begin the day’s labor, and the last to turn in.  It is impossible to
live long in the Orient or the south of France without becoming attached
to those gentle, willing animals.  The rôle which honest “Bourico” fills
so well abroad is played on this side of the Atlantic by the American
husband.

I mean no disrespect to my married compatriots; on the contrary, I admire
them as I do all docile, unselfish beings.  It is well for our women,
however, that their lords, like the little Oriental donkeys, ignore their
strength, and are content to toil on to the end of their days, expecting
neither praise nor thanks in return.




CHAPTER 14—“_Carolus_”


In the early seventies a group of students—dissatisfied with the
cut-and-dried instruction of the Paris art school and attracted by
certain qualities of color and technique in the work of a young Frenchman
from the city of Lille, who was just beginning to attract the attention
of connoisseurs—went in a body to his studio with the request that he
would oversee their work and direct their studies.  The artist thus
chosen was Carolus-Duran.  Oddly enough, a majority of the youths who
sought him out and made him their master were Americans.

The first modest workroom on the Boulevard Montparnasse was soon too
small to hold the pupils who crowded under this newly raised banner, and
a move was made to more commodious quarters near the master’s private
studio.  Sargent, Dannat, Harrison, Beckwith, Hinckley, and many others
whom it is needless to mention here, will—if these lines come under their
notice—doubtless recall with a thrill of pleasure the roomy one-storied
structure in the rue Notre-Dame des Champs where we established our
_atelier d’élèves_, a self-supporting cooperative concern, each student
contributing ten francs a month toward rent, fire, and models,
“Carolus”—the name by which this master is universally known abroad—not
only refusing all compensation, according to the immutable custom of
French painters of distinction, but, as we discovered later, contributing
too often from his own pocket to help out the _massier_ at the end of a
difficult season, or smooth the path of some improvident pupil.

Those were cloudless, enchanted days we passed in the tumbled down old
atelier: an ardent springtime of life when the future beckons gayly and
no doubts of success obscure the horizon.  Our young master’s enthusiasm
fired his circle of pupils, who, as each succeeding year brought him
increasing fame, revelled in a reflected glory with the generous
admiration of youth, in which there is neither calculation nor shadow of
envy.

A portrait of Madame de Portalais, exhibited about this time, drew all
art-loving Paris around the new celebrity’s canvas.  Shortly after, the
government purchased a painting (of our master’s beautiful wife), now
known as _La Femme au Gant_, for the Luxembourg Gallery.

It is difficult to overestimate the impetus that a master’s successes
impart to the progress of his pupils.  My first studious year in Paris
had been passed in the shadow of an elderly painter, who was comfortably
dozing on the laurels of thirty years before.  The change from that
sleepy environment to the vivid enthusiasm and dash of Carolus-Duran’s
studio was like stepping out of a musty cloister into the warmth and
movement of a market-place.

Here, be it said in passing, lies perhaps the secret of the dry rot that
too often settles on our American art schools.  We, for some unknown
reason, do not take the work of native painters seriously, nor encourage
them in proportion to their merit.  In consequence they retain but a
feeble hold upon their pupils.

Carolus, handsome, young, successful, courted, was an ideal leader for a
band of ambitious, high-strung youths, repaying their devotion with an
untiring interest and lifting clever and dull alike on the strong wings
of his genius.  His visits to the studio, on which his friend Henner
often accompanied him, were frequent and prolonged; certain Tuesdays
being especially appreciated by us, as they were set apart for his
criticism of original compositions.

When our sketches (the subject for which had been given out in advance)
were arranged, and we had seated ourselves in a big half-circle on the
floor, Carolus would install himself on a tall stool, the one seat the
studio boasted, and chat _à propos_ of the works before him on
composition, on classic art, on the theories of color and clair-obscur.
Brilliant talks, inlaid with much wit and incisive criticism, the memory
of which must linger in the minds of all who were fortunate enough to
hear them.  Nor was it to the studio alone that our master’s interest
followed us.  He would drop in at the Louvre, when we were copying there,
and after some pleasant words of advice and encouragement, lead us off
for a stroll through the galleries, interrupted by stations before his
favorite masterpieces.

So important has he always considered a constant study of Renaissance art
that recently, when about to commence his _Triumph of Bacchus_, Carolus
copied one of Rubens’s larger canvases with all the naïveté of a
beginner.

An occasion soon presented itself for us to learn another side of our
trade by working with our master on a ceiling ordered of him by the state
for the Palace of the Luxembourg.  The vast studios which the city of
Paris provides on occasions of this kind, with a liberality that should
make our home corporations reflect, are situated out beyond the
Exhibition buildings, in a curious, unfrequented quarter, ignored alike
by Parisians and tourists, where the city stores compromising statues and
the valuable débris of her many revolutions.  There, among throneless
Napoleons and riderless bronze steeds, we toiled for over six months side
by side with our master, on gigantic _Apotheosis of Marie de Médicis_,
serving in turn as painter and painted, and leaving the imprint of our
hands and the reflection of our faces scattered about the composition.
Day after day, when work was over, we would hoist the big canvas by means
of a system of ropes and pulleys, from a perpendicular to the horizontal
position it was to occupy permanently, and then sit straining our necks
and discussing the progress of the work until the tardy spring twilight
warned us to depart.

The year 1877 brought Carolus-Duran the _médaille d’honneur_, a crowning
recompense that set the atelier mad with delight.  We immediately
organized a great (but economical) banquet to commemorate the event, over
which our master presided, with much modesty, considering the amount of
incense we burned before him, and the speeches we made.  One of our
number even burst into some very bad French verses, asserting that the
painters of the world in general fell back before him—

    . . . _épouvantès_—
    _Craignant ègalement sa brosse et son èpèe_.

This allusion to his proficiency in fencing was considered particularly
neat, and became the favorite song of the studio, to be howled in and out
of season.

Curiously enough, there is always something in Carolus-Duran’s attitude
when at work which recalls the swordsman.  With an enormous palette in
one hand and a brush in the other, he has a way of planting himself in
front of his sitter that is amusingly suggestive of a duel.  His lithe
body sways to and fro, his fine leonine face quivers with the intense
study of his model; then with a sudden spring forward, a few rapid
touches are dashed on the canvas (like home strokes in the enemy’s
weakest spot) with a precision of hand acquired only by long years of
fencing.

An order to paint the king and queen of Portugal was the next step on the
road to fame, another rung on the pleasant ladder of success.  When this
work was done the delighted sovereign presented the painter with the
order of “Christ of Portugal,” together with many other gifts, among
which a caricature of the master at work, signed by his sitter, is not
the least valued.

When the great schism occurred several years ago which rent the art world
of France, Carolus-Duran was elected vice-president of the new school
under Meissonier, to whose office he succeeded on that master’s death;
and now directs and presides over the yearly exhibition known as the
_Salon du Champ de Mars_.

At his château near Paris or at Saint Raphael, on the Mediterranean, the
master lives, like Leonardo of old, the existence of a grand seigneur,
surrounded by his family, innumerable guests, and the horses and dogs he
loves,—a group of which his ornate figure and expressive face form the
natural centre.  Each year he lives more away from the world, but no more
inspiriting sight can be imagined than the welcome the president receives
of a “varnishing” day, when he makes his entry surrounded by his pupils.
The students cheer themselves hoarse, and the public climbs on everything
that comes to hand to see him pass.  It is hard to realize then that this
is the same man who, not content with his youthful progress, retired into
an Italian monastery that he might commune face to face with nature
undisturbed.

The works of no other painter give me the same sensation of quivering
vitality, except the Velasquez in the Madrid Gallery and, perhaps,
Sargent at his best; and one feels all through the American painter’s
work the influence of his first and only master.

“_Tout ce qui n’est pas indispensable est nuisible_,” a phrase which is
often on Carolus-Duran’s lips, may be taken as the keynote of his work,
where one finds a noble simplicity of line and color scheme, an
elimination of useless detail, a contempt for tricks to enforce an
effect, and above all a comprehension and mastery of light, vitality, and
texture—those three unities of the painter’s art—that bring his canvases
very near to those of his self-imposed Spanish master.

Those who know the French painter’s more important works and his many
splendid studies from the nude, feel it a pity that such masterpieces as
the equestrian portrait of Mlle. Croisette, of the Comédie Française, the
_Réveil_, the superb full length of Mme. Pelouse on the Terrace of
Chenonceau, and the head of Gounod in the Luxembourg, could not be
collected into one exhibition, that lovers of art here in America might
realize for themselves how this master’s works are of the class that
typify a school and an epoch, and engrave their author’s name among those
destined to become household words in the mouths of future generations.




CHAPTER 15—The Grand Opera Fad


Without being more curious than my neighbors, there are several social
mysteries that I should like to fathom, among others, the real reasons
that induce the different classes of people one sees at the opera to
attend that form of entertainment.

A taste for the theatre is natural enough.  It is also easy to understand
why people who are fond of sport and animals enjoy races and dog shows.
But the continued vogue of grand opera, and more especially of Wagner’s
long-drawn-out compositions, among our restless, unmusical compatriots,
remains unexplained.

The sheeplike docility of our public is apparent in numberless ways; in
none, however, more strikingly than in their choice of amusements.  In
business and religion, people occasionally think for themselves; in the
selection of entertainments, never! but are apparently content to receive
their opinions and prejudices ready-made from some unseen and omnipotent
Areopagus.

The careful study of an opera audience from different parts of our
auditorium has brought me to the conclusion that the public there may be
loosely divided into three classes—leaving out reporters of fashionable
intelligence, dressmakers in search of ideas, and the lady inhabitants of
“Crank Alley” (as a certain corner of the orchestra is called), who sit
in perpetual adoration before the elderly tenor.

First—but before venturing further on dangerously thin ice, it may be as
well to suggest that this subject is not treated in absolute seriousness,
and that all assertions must not be taken _au pied de la lettre_.  First,
then, and most important, come the stockholders, for without them the
Metropolitan would close.  The majority of these fortunate people and
their guests look upon the opera as a social function, where one can meet
one’s friends and be seen, an entertaining antechamber in which to linger
until it’s time to “go on,” her Box being to-day as necessary a part of a
great lady’s outfit as a country house or a ball-room.

Second are those who attend because it has become the correct thing to be
seen at the opera.  There is so much wealth in this city and so little
opportunity for its display, so many people long to go about who are
asked nowhere, that the opera has been seized upon as a centre in which
to air rich apparel and elbow the “world.”  This list fills a large part
of the closely packed parquet and first balcony.

Third, and last, come the lovers of music, who mostly inhabit greater
altitudes.

The motive of the typical box-owner is simple.  Her night at the opera is
the excuse for a cosy little dinner, one woman friend (two would spoil
the effect of the box) and four men, without counting the husband, who
appears at dinner, but rarely goes further.  The pleasant meal and the
subsequent smoke are prolonged until 9 or 9.30, when the men are finally
dragged murmuring from their cigars.  If she has been fortunate and timed
her arrival to correspond with an _entr’acte_, my lady is radiant.  The
lights are up, she can see who are present, and the public can inspect
her toilet and jewels as she settles herself under the combined gaze of
the house, and proceeds to hold an informal reception for the rest of the
evening.  The men she has brought with her quickly cede their places to
callers, and wander yawning in the lobby or invade the neighboring boxes
and add their voices to the general murmur.

Although there is much less talking than formerly, it is the toleration
of this custom at all by the public that indicates (along with many other
straws) that we are not a music-loving people.  Audible conversation
during a performance would not be allowed for a moment by a Continental
audience.  The little visiting that takes place in boxes abroad is done
during the _entr’actes_, when people retire to the salons back of their
_loges_ to eat ices and chat.  Here those little parlors are turned into
cloak-rooms, and small talk goes on in many boxes during the entire
performance.  The joke or scandal of the day is discussed; strangers in
town, or literary and artistic lights—“freaks,” they are discriminatingly
called—are pointed out, toilets passed in review, and those dreadful two
hours passed which, for some undiscovered reason, must elapse between a
dinner and a dance.  If a favorite tenor is singing, and no one happens
to be whispering nonsense over her shoulder, my lady may listen in a
distrait way.  It is not safe, however, to count on prolonged attention
or ask her questions about the performance.  She is apt to be a bit hazy
as to who is singing, and with the exception of _Faust_ and _Carmen_, has
rudimentary ideas about plots.  Singers come and go, weep, swoon, or are
killed, without interfering with her equanimity.  She has, for instance,
seen the _Huguenots_ and the _Rheingold_ dozens of times, but knows no
more why Raoul is brought blindfolded to Chenonceaux, or what Wotan and
Erda say to each other in their interminable scenes, than she does of the
contents of the Vedas.  For the matter of that, if three or four
principal airs were suppressed from an opera and the scenery and costumes
changed, many in that chattering circle would, I fear, not know what they
were listening to.

Last winter, when Melba sang in _Aida_, disguised by dark hair and a
brown skin, a lady near me vouchsafed the opinion that the “little black
woman hadn’t a bad voice;” a gentleman (to whom I remarked last week
“that as Sembrich had sung Rosina in the _Barber_, it was rather a shock
to see her appear as that lady’s servant in the _Mariage de Figaro_”)
looked his blank amazement until it was explained to him that one of
those operas was a continuation of the other.  After a pause he remarked,
“They are not by the same composer, anyway!  Because the first’s by
Rossini, and the _Mariage_ is by Bon Marché.  I’ve been at his shop in
Paris.”

The presence of the second category—the would-be fashionable people—is
not so easily accounted for.  Their attendance can hardly be attributed
to love of melody, as they are, if anything, a shade less musical than
the box-dwellers, who, by the bye, seem to exercise an irresistible
fascination, to judge by the trend of conversation and direction of
glasses.  Although an imposing and sufficiently attentive throng, it
would be difficult to find a less discriminating public than that which
gathers nightly in the Metropolitan parterre.  One wonders how many of
those people care for music and how many attend because it is expensive
and “swell.”

They will listen with the same bland contentment to either bad or good
performances so long as a world-renowned artist (some one who is being
paid a comfortable little fortune for the evening) is on the stage.  The
orchestra may be badly led (it often is); the singers may flat—or be out
of voice; the performance may go all at sixes and sevens—there is never a
murmur of dissent.  Faults that would set an entire audience at Naples or
Milan hissing are accepted herewith ignorant approval.

The unfortunate part of it is that this weakness of ours has become
known.  The singers feel they can give an American audience any slipshod
performance.  I have seen a favorite soprano shrug her shoulders as she
entered her dressing-room and exclaim: “_Mon Dieu_!  How I shuffled
through that act!  They’d have hooted me off the stage in Berlin, but
here no one seems to care.  Did you notice the baritone to-night?  He
wasn’t on the key once during our duo.  I cannot sing my best, try as I
will, when I hear the public applauding good and bad alike!”

It is strange that our pleasure-loving rich people should have hit on the
opera as a favorite haunt.  We and the English are the only race who will
attend performances in a foreign language which we don’t understand.  How
can intelligent people who don’t care for music go on, season after
season, listening to operas, the plots of which they ignore, and which in
their hearts they find dull?

Is it so very amusing to watch two middle-aged ladies nagging each other,
at two o’clock in the morning, on a public square, as they do in
_Lohengrin_?  Do people find the lecture that Isolde’s husband delivers
to the guilty lovers entertaining?  Does an opera produce any illusion on
my neighbors?  I wish it did on me!  I see too plainly the paint on the
singers’ hot faces and the cords straining in their tired throats!  I sit
on certain nights in agony, fearing to see stout Romeo roll on the stage
in apoplexy!  The sopranos, too, have a way, when about to emit a
roulade, that is more suggestive of a dentist’s chair, and the attendant
gargle, than of a love phrase.

When two celebrities combine in a final duo, facing the public and not
each other, they give the impression of victims whom an unseen inquisitor
is torturing.  Each turn of his screw draws out a wilder cry.  The
orchestra (in the pay of the demon) does all it can to prevent their
shrieks from reaching the public.  The lovers in turn redouble their
efforts; they are purple in the face and glistening with perspiration.
Defeat, they know, is before them, for the orchestra has the greater
staying power!  The flutes bleat; the trombones grunt; the fiddles
squeal; an epileptic leader cuts wildly into the air about him.  When,
finally, their strength exhausted, the breathless human beings, with one
last ear-piercing note, give up the struggle and retire, the public,
excited by the unequal contest, bursts into thunders of applause.

Why wouldn’t it be a good idea, in order to avoid these painful
exhibitions, to have an arrangement of screens, with the singing people
behind and a company of young and attractive pantomimists going through
the gestures and movements in front?  Otherwise, how can the most
imaginative natures lose themselves at an opera?  Even when the singers
are comely, there is always that eternal double row of stony-faced
witnesses in full view, whom no crimes astonish and no misfortunes melt.
It takes most of the poetry out of Faust’s first words with Marguerite,
to have that short interview interrupted by a line of old, weary women
shouting, “Let us whirl in the waltz o’er the mount and the plain!”  Or
when Scotch Lucy appears in a smart tea-gown and is good enough to
perform difficult exercises before a half-circle of Italian gentlemen in
pantalets and ladies in court costumes, does she give any one the
illusion of an abandoned wife dying of a broken heart alone in the
Highlands?  Broken heart, indeed!  It’s much more likely she’ll die of a
ruptured blood-vessel!

Philistines in matters musical, like myself, unfortunate mortals whom the
sweetest sounds fail to enthrall when connected with no memory or idea,
or when prolonged beyond a limited period, must approach the third group
with hesitation and awe.  That they are sincere, is evident.  The rapt
expressions of their faces, and their patience, bear testimony to this
fact.  For a long time I asked myself, “Where have I seen that intense,
absorbed attitude before?”  Suddenly one evening another scene rose in my
memory.

Have you ever visited Tangiers?  In the market-place of that city you
will find the inhabitants crouched by hundreds around their native
musicians.  When we were there, one old duffer—the Wagner, doubtless, of
the place—was having an immense success.  No matter at what hour of the
day we passed through that square, there was always the same spellbound
circle of half-clad Turks and Arabs squatting silent while “Wagner”
tinkled to them on a three-stringed lute and chanted in a high-pitched,
dismal whine—like the squeaking of an unfastened door in the wind.  At
times, for no apparent reason, the never-varying, never-ending measure
would be interrupted by a flutter of applause, but his audience remained
mostly sunk in a hypnotic apathy.  I never see a “Ring” audience now
without thinking of that scene outside the Bab-el-Marsa gate, which has
led me to ask different people just what sensations serious music
produced upon them.  The answers have been varied and interesting.  One
good lady who rarely misses a German opera confessed that sweet sounds
acted upon her like opium.  Neither scenery nor acting nor plot were of
any importance.  From the first notes of the overture to the end, she
floated in an ecstatic dream, oblivious of time and place.  When it was
over she came back to herself faint with fatigue.  Another professed
lover of Wagner said that his greatest pleasure was in following the
different “motives” as they recurred in the music.  My faith in that
gentleman was shaken, however, when I found the other evening that he had
mistaken Van Dyck for Jean de Reszké through an entire performance.  He
may be a dab at recognizing his friends the “motives,” but his
discoveries don’t apparently go as far as tenors!

No one doubts that hundreds of people unaffectedly love German opera, but
that as many affect to appreciate it in order to appear intellectual is
certain.

Once upon a time the unworthy member of an ultra-serious “Browning” class
in this city, doubting the sincerity of her companions, asked permission
to read them a poem of the master’s which she found beyond her
comprehension.  When the reading was over the opinion of her friends was
unanimous.  “Nothing could be simpler!  The lines were lucidity itself!
Such close reasoning etc.”  But dismay fell upon them when the naughty
lady announced, with a peal of laughter, that she had been reading
alternate lines from opposite pages.  She no longer disturbs the harmony
of that circle!

Bearing this tale in mind, I once asked a musician what proportion of the
audience at a “Ring” performance he thought would know if alternate
scenes were given from two of Wagner’s operas, unless the scenery
enlightened them.  His estimate was that perhaps fifty per cent might
find out the fraud.  He put the number of people who could give an
intelligent account of those plots at about thirty per hundred.

The popularity of music, he added, is largely due to the fact that it
saves people the trouble of thinking.  Pleasant sounds soothe the nerves,
and, if prolonged long enough in a darkened room will, like the Eastern
tom-toms, lull the senses into a mild form of trance.  This must be what
the gentleman meant who said he wished he could sleep as well in a
“Wagner” car as he did at one of his operas!

Being a tailless old fox, I look with ever-increasing suspicion on the
too-luxuriant caudal appendages of my neighbors, and think with amusement
of the multitudes who during the last ten years have sacrificed
themselves upon the altar of grand opera—simple, kindly souls, with
little or no taste for classical music, who have sat in the dark
(mentally and physically), applauding what they didn’t understand, and
listening to vague German mythology set to sounds that appear to us
outsiders like music sunk into a verbose dotage.  I am convinced the
greater number would have preferred a jolly performance of _Mme. Angot_
or the _Cloches de Corneville_, cut in two by a good ballet.

It is, however, so easy to be mistaken on subjects of this kind that
generalizing is dangerous.  Many great authorities have liked tuneless
music.  One of the most telling arguments in its favor was recently
advanced by a foreigner.  The Chinese ambassador told us last winter in a
club at Washington that Wagner’s was the only European music that he
appreciated and enjoyed.  “You see,” he added, “music is a much older art
with us than in Europe, and has naturally reached a far greater
perfection.  The German school has made a long step in advance, and I can
now foresee a day not far distant when, under its influence, your music
will closely resemble our own.”




CHAPTER 16—The Poetic _Cabarets_ of Paris


Those who have not lived in France can form little idea of the important
place the _café_ occupies in the life of an average Frenchman, clubs as
we know them or as they exist in England being rare, and when found
being, with few exceptions, but gambling-houses in disguise.  As a
Frenchman rarely asks an acquaintance, or even a friend, to his
apartment, the _café_ has become the common ground where all meet, for
business or pleasure.  Not in Paris only, but all over France, in every
garrison town, provincial city, or tiny village, the _café_ is the chief
attraction, the centre of thought, the focus toward which all the rays of
masculine existence converge.

For the student, newly arrived from the provinces, to whose modest purse
the theatres and other places of amusement are practically closed, the
_café_ is a supreme resource.  His mind is moulded, his ideas and
opinions formed, more by what he hears and sees there than by any other
influence.  A restaurant is of little importance.  One may eat anywhere.
But the choice of his _café_ will often give the bent to a young man’s
career, and indicate his exact shade of politics and his opinions on
literature, music, or art.  In Paris, to know a man at all is to know
where you can find him at the hour of the _apéritif_—what Baudelaire
called

    _L’heure sainte_
    _De l’absinthe_.

When young men form a society among themselves, a _café_ is chosen as
their meeting-place.  Thousands of establishments exist only by such
patronage, as, for example, the Café de la Régence, Place du Théâtre
Français, which is frequented entirely by men who play chess.

Business men transact their affairs as much over their coffee as in their
offices.  The reading man finds at his _café_ the daily and weekly
papers; a writer is sure of the undisturbed possession of pen, ink, and
paper.  Henri Murger, the author, when asked once why he continued to
patronize a certain establishment notorious for the inferior quality of
its beer, answered, “Yes, the beer is poor, but they keep such good
_ink_!”

The use of a _café_ does not imply any great expenditure, a
_consummation_ costing but little.  With it is acquired the right to use
the establishment for an indefinite number of hours, the client being
warmed, lighted, and served.  From five to seven, and again after dinner,
the _habitués_ stroll in, grouping themselves about the small tables,
each new-comer joining a congenial circle, ordering his drink, and
settling himself for a long sitting.  The last editorial, the newest
picture, or the fall of a ministry is discussed with a vehemence and an
interest unknown to Anglo-Saxon natures.  Suddenly, in the excitement of
the discussion, some one will rise in his place and begin speaking.  If
you happen to drop in at that moment, the lady at the desk will welcome
you with, “You are just in time!  Monsieur So-and-So is speaking; the
evening promises to be interesting.”  She is charmed; her establishment
will shine with a reflected light, and new patrons be drawn there, if the
debates are brilliant.  So universal is this custom that there is hardly
an orator to-day at the French bar or in the Senate, who has not broken
his first lance in some such obscure tournament, under the smiling
glances of the _dame du comptoir_.

Opposite the Palace of the Luxembourg, in the heart of the old Latin
Quarter, stands a quaint building, half hotel, half _café_, where many
years ago Joseph II. resided while visiting his sister, Marie Antoinette.
It is known now as Foyot’s; this name must awaken many happy memories in
the hearts of American students, for it was long their favorite
meeting-place.  In the early seventies a club, formed among the literary
and poetic youth of Paris, selected Foyot’s as their “home” during the
winter months.  Their summer vacations were spent in visiting the
university towns of France, reciting verses, or acting in original plays
at Nancy, Bordeaux, Lyons, or Caen.  The enthusiasm these youthful
performances created inspired one of their number with the idea of
creating in Paris, on a permanent footing, a centre where a limited
public could meet the young poets of the day and hear them recite their
verses and monologues in an informal way.

The success of the original “Chat Noir,” the first _cabaret_ of this
kind, was largely owing to the sympathetic and attractive nature of its
founder, young Salis, who drew around him, by his sunny disposition, shy
personalities who, but for him, would still be “mute, inglorious
Miltons.”  Under his kindly and discriminating rule many a successful
literary career has started.  Salis’s gifted nature combined a delicate
taste and critical acumen with a rare business ability.  His first
venture, an obscure little _café_ on the Boulevard Rochechouart, in the
outlying quarter beyond the Place Pigalle, quickly became famous, its
ever-increasing vogue forcing its happy proprietor to seek more
commodious quarters in the rue Victor Massé, where the world-famous “Chat
Noir” was installed with much pomp and many joyous ceremonies.

The old word _cabaret_, corresponding closely to our English “inn,” was
chosen, and the establishment decorated in imitation of a Louis XIII.
_hôtellerie_.  Oaken beams supported the low-studded ceilings: The
plaster walls disappeared behind tapestries, armor, old _faïence_.  Beer
and other liquids were served in quaint porcelain or pewter mugs, and the
waiters were dressed (merry anachronism) in the costume of members of the
Institute (the Immortal Forty), who had so long led poetry in chains.
The success of the “Black Cat” in her new quarters was immense, all Paris
crowding through her modest doors.  Salis had founded Montmartre!—the
rugged old hill giving birth to a generation of writers and poets, and
nourishing this new school at her granite breasts.

It would be difficult to imagine a form of entertainment more tempting
than was offered in this picturesque inn.  In addition to the first, the
entire second floor of the building had been thrown into one large room,
the walls covered with a thousand sketches, caricatures, and crayon
drawings by hands since celebrated the world over.  A piano, with many
chairs and tables, completed the unpretending installation.  Here, during
a couple of hours each evening, either by the piano or simply standing in
their places, the young poets gave utterance to the creations of their
imagination, the musicians played their latest inspirations, the
_raconteur_ told his newest story.  They called each other and the better
known among the guests by their names, and joked mutual weaknesses,
eliminating from these gatherings every shade of a perfunctory
performance.

It is impossible to give an idea of the delicate flavor of such informal
evenings—the sensation of being at home that the picturesque surroundings
produced, the low murmur of conversation, the clink of glasses, the swing
of the waltz movement played by a master hand, interrupted only when some
slender form would lean against the piano and pour forth burning words of
infinite pathos,—the inspired young face lighted up by the passion and
power of the lines.  The burst of applause that his talent called forth
would hardly have died away before another figure would take the poet’s
place, a wave of laughter welcoming the new-comer, whose twinkling eyes
and demure smile promised a treat of fun and humor.  So the evening would
wear gayly to its end, the younger element in the audience, full of the
future, drinking in long draughts of poetry and art, the elders charmed
to live over again the days of their youth and feel in touch once more
with the present.

In this world of routine and conventions an innovation as brilliantly
successful as this could hardly be inaugurated without raising a
whirlwind of jealousy and opposition.  The struggle was long and arduous.
Directors of theatres and concert halls, furious to see a part of their
public tempted away, raised the cry of immorality against the new-comers,
and called to their aid every resource of law and chicanery.  At the end
of the first year Salis found himself with over eight hundred summonses
and lawsuits on his hands.  After having made every effort, knocked at
every door, in his struggle for existence, he finally conceived the happy
thought of appealing directly to Grévy, then President of the Republic,
and in his audience with the latter succeeded in charming and interesting
him, as he had so many others.  The influence of the head of the state
once brought to bear on the affair, Salis had the joy of seeing
opposition crushed and the storm blow itself out.

From this moment, the poets, feeling themselves appreciated and their
rights acknowledged and defended, flocked to the “Sacred Mountain,” as
Montmartre began to be called; other establishments of the same character
sprang up in the neighborhood.  Most important among these were the “4
z’Arts,” Boulevard de Clichy, the “Tambourin,” and La Butte.

Trombert, who, together with Fragerolle, Goudezki, and Marcel Lefèvre,
had just ended an artistic voyage in the south of France, opened the “4
z’Arts,” to which the novelty-loving public quickly found its way,
crowding to applaud Coquelin _cadet_, Fragson, and other budding
celebrities.  It was here that the poets first had the idea of producing
a piece in which rival _cabarets_ were reviewed and laughingly
criticised.  The success was beyond all precedent, in spite of the
difficulty of giving a play without a stage, without scenery or
accessories of any kind, the interest centring in the talent with which
the lines were declaimed by their authors, who next had the pleasant
thought of passing in review the different classes of popular songs,
Clovis Hugues, at the same time poet and statesman, discoursing on each
subject, and introducing the singer; Brittany local songs, Provençal
ballads, ant the half Spanish, half French _chansons_ of the Pyrenees
were sung or recited by local poets with the charm and abandon of their
distinctive races.

The great critics did not disdain to attend these informal gatherings,
nor to write columns of serious criticism on the subject in their papers.

At the hour when all Paris takes its _apéritif_ the “4 z’Arts” became the
meeting-place of the painters, poets, and writers of the day.  Montmartre
gradually replaced the old Latin Quarter; it is there to-day that one
must seek for the gayety and humor, the pathos and the makeshifts of
Bohemia.

The “4 z’Arts,” next to the “Chat Noir,” has had the greatest influence
on the taste of our time,—the pleiad of poets that grouped themselves
around it in the beginning, dispersing later to form other centres,
which, in their turn, were to influence the minds and moods of thousands.

Another charming form of entertainment inaugurated by this group of men
is that of “shadow pictures,” conceived originally by Caran d’Ache, and
carried by him to a marvellous perfection.  A medium-sized frame filled
with ground glass is suspended at one end of a room and surrounded by
sombre draperies.  The room is darkened; against the luminous background
of the glass appear small black groups (shadows cast by figures cut out
of cardboard).  These figures move, advancing and retreating, grouping or
separating themselves to the cadence of the poet’s verses, for which they
form the most original and striking illustrations.  Entire poems are
given accompanied by these shadow pictures.

One of Caran d’Ache’s greatest successes in this line was an _Epopée de
Napoléon_,—the great Emperor appearing on foot and on horseback, the long
lines of his army passing before him in the foreground or small in the
distance.  They stormed heights, cheered on by his presence, or formed
hollow squares to repulse the enemy.  During their evolutions, the clear
voice of the poet rang out from the darkness with thrilling effect.

The nicest art is necessary to cut these little figures to the required
perfection.  So great was the talent of their inventor that, when he gave
burlesques of the topics of the day, or presented the celebrities of the
hour to his public, each figure would be recognized with a burst of
delighted applause.  The great Sarah was represented in poses of infinite
humor, surrounded by her menagerie or receiving the homage of the
universe.  Political leaders, foreign sovereigns, social and operatic
stars, were made to pass before a laughing public.  None were spared.
Paris went mad with delight at this new “art,” and for months it was
impossible to find a seat vacant in the hall.

At the Boite à Musique, the idea was further developed.  By an ingenious
arrangement of lights, of which the secret has been carefully kept,
landscapes are represented in color; all the gradations of light are
given, from the varied twilight hues to purple night, until the moon,
rising, lights anew the picture.  During all these variations of color
little groups continue to come and go, acting out the story of a poem,
which the poet delivers from the surrounding obscurity as only an author
can render his own lines.

One of the pillars of this attractive centre was Jules Jouy, who made a
large place for himself in the hearts of his contemporaries—a true poet,
whom neither privations nor the difficult beginnings of an unknown writer
could turn from his vocation.  His songs are alternately tender, gay, and
bitingly sarcastic.  Some of his better-known ballads were written for
and marvellously interpreted by Yvette Guilbert.  The difficult critics,
Sarcey and Jules Lemaître, have sounded his praise again and again.

A _cabaret_ of another kind which enjoyed much celebrity, more on account
of the personality of the poet who founded it than from any originality
or picturesqueness in its intallation, was the “Mirliton,” opened by
Aristide Bruant in the little rooms that had sheltered the original “Chat
Noir.”

To give an account of the “Mirliton” is to tell the story of Bruant, the
most popular ballad-writer in France to-day.  This original and eccentric
poet is as well-known to a Parisian as the boulevards or the Arc de
Triomphe.  His costume of shabby black velvet, Brittany waistcoat, red
shirt, top-boots, and enormous hat is a familiar feature in the
caricatures and prints of the day.  His little _cabaret_ remains closed
during the day, opening its doors toward evening.  The personality of the
ballad-writer pervades the atmosphere.  He walks about the tiny place
hailing his acquaintances with some gay epigram, receiving strangers with
easy familiarity or chilling disdain, as the humor takes him; then in a
moment, with a rapid change of expression, pouring out the ringing lines
of one of his ballads—always the story of the poor and humble, for he has
identified himself with the outcast and the disinherited.  His volumes
_Dans la Rue_ and _Sur la Route_ have had an enormous popularity, their
contents being known and sung all over France.

In 1892 Bruant was received as a member of the society of _Gens de
Lettres_.  It may be of interest to recall a part of the speech made by
François Coppée on the occasion: “It is with the greatest pleasure that I
present to my confrères my good friend, the ballad-writer, Aristide
Bruant.  I value highly the author of _Dans la Rue_.  When I close his
volume of sad and caustic verses it is with the consoling thought that
even vice and crime have their conscience: that if there is suffering
there is a possible redemption.  He has sought his inspiration in the
gutter, it is true, but he has seen there a reflection of the stars.”

In the Avenue Trudaine, not far from the other _cabarets_, the “Ane
Rouge” was next opened, in a quiet corner of the immense suburb, its
shady-little garden, on which the rooms open, making it a favorite
meeting-place during the warm months.  Of a summer evening no more
congenial spot can be found in all Paris.  The quaint chambers have been
covered with mural paintings or charcoal caricatures of the poets
themselves, or of familiar faces among the clients and patrons of the
place.

One of the many talents that clustered around this quiet little garden
was the brilliant Paul Verlaine, the most Bohemian of all inhabitants of
modern Prague, whose death has left a void, difficult to fill.  Fame and
honors came too late.  He died in destitution, if not absolutely of
hunger; to-day his admirers are erecting a bronze bust of him in the
Garden of the Luxembourg, with money that would have gone far toward
making his life happy.

In the old hôtel of the Lesdiguières family, rue de la Tour d’Auvergne,
the “Carillon” opened its doors in 1893, and quickly conquered a place in
the public favor, the inimitable fun and spirits of Tiercy drawing crowds
to the place.

The famous “Tréteau de Tabarin,” which to-day holds undisputed precedence
over all the _cabarets_ of Paris, was among the last to appear.  It was
founded by the brilliant Fursy and a group of his friends.  Here no pains
have been spared to form a setting worthy of the poets and their public.

Many years ago, in the days of the good king Louis XIII., a strolling
poet-actor, Tabarin, erected his little canvas-covered stage before the
statue of Henry IV., on the Pont-Neuf, and drew the court and the town by
his fun and pathos.  The founders of the latest and most complete of
Parisian _cabarets_ have reconstructed, as far as possible, this historic
scene.  On the wall of the room where the performances are given, is
painted a view of old Paris, the Seine and its bridges, the towers of
Notre Dame in the distance, and the statue of Louis XIII.’s warlike
father in the foreground.  In front of this painting stands a staging of
rough planks, reproducing the little theatre of Tabarin.  Here, every
evening, the authors and poets play in their own pieces, recite their
verses, and tell their stories.  Not long ago a young musician, who has
already given an opera to the world, sang an entire one-act operetta of
his composition, changing his voice for the different parts, imitating
choruses by clever effects on the piano.

Montmartre is now sprinkled with attractive _cabarets_, the taste of the
public for such informal entertainments having grown each year; with
reason, for the careless grace of the surroundings, the absence of any
useless restraint or obligation as to hour or duration, has a charm for
thousands whom a long concert or the inevitable five acts at the Français
could not tempt.  It would be difficult to overrate the influence such an
atmosphere, breathed in youth, must have on the taste and character.  The
absence of a sordid spirit, the curse of our material day and generation,
the contact with intellects trained to incase their thoughts in serried
verse or crisp and lucid prose, cannot but form the hearer’s mind into a
higher and better mould.  It is both a satisfaction and a hope for the
future to know that these influences are being felt all over the capital
and throughout the length and breadth of France.  There are at this
moment in Paris alone three or four hundred poets, ballad writers, and
_raconteurs_ who recite their works in public.

It must be hard for the untravelled Anglo-Saxon to grasp the idea that a
poet can, without loss of prestige, recite his lines in a public _café_
before a mixed audience.  If such doubting souls could, however, be
present at one of these _noctes ambrosianæ_, they would acknowledge that
the Latin temperament can throw a grace and child-like abandon around an
act that would cause an Englishman or an American to appear supremely
ridiculous.  One’s taste and sense of fitness are never shocked.  It
seems the most natural thing in the world to be sitting with your glass
of beer before you, while some rising poet, whose name ten years later
may figure among the “Immortal Forty,” tells to you his loves and his
ambition, or brings tears into your eyes with a description of some
humble hero or martyr.

From the days of Homer poetry has been the instructor of nations.  In the
Orient to-day the poet story-teller holds his audience spellbound for
hours, teaching the people their history and supplying their minds with
food for thought, raising them above the dull level of the brutes by the
charm of his verse and the elevation of his ideas.  The power of poetry
is the same now as three thousand years ago.  Modern skeptical Paris,
that scoffs at all creeds and chafes impatiently under any rule, will sit
to-day docile and complaisant, charmed by the melody of a poet’s voice;
its passions lulled or quickened, like Alexander’s of old, at the will of
a modern Timotheus.




CHAPTER 17—Etiquette At Home and Abroad


Reading that a sentinel had been punished the other day at St. Petersburg
for having omitted to present arms, as her Imperial Highness, the Grand
Duchess Olga, was leaving the winter palace—in her nurse’s arms—I smiled
at what appeared to be needless punctilio; then, as is my habit, began
turning the subject over, and gradually came to the conclusion that while
it could doubtless be well to suppress much of the ceremonial encumbering
court life, it might not be amiss if we engrafted a little more etiquette
into our intercourse with strangers and the home relations.  In our dear
free and easy-going country there is a constant tendency to loosen the
ties of fireside etiquette until any manners are thought good enough, as
any toilet is considered sufficiently attractive for home use.  A
singular impression has grown up that formal politeness and the saying of
gracious and complimentary things betray the toady and the hypocrite,
both if whom are abhorrent to Americans.

By the force of circumstances most people are civil enough in general
society; while many fail to keep to their high standard in the intimacy
of home life and in their intercourse with inferiors, which is a pity, as
these are the two cases where self-restraint and amenity are most
required.  Politeness is, after all, but the dictate of a kind heart, and
supplies the oil necessary to make the social machinery run smoothly.  In
home life, which is the association during many hours each day of people
of varying dispositions, views, and occupations, friction is inevitable;
and there is especial need of lubrication to lessen the wear and tear and
eliminate jarring.

Americans are always much shocked to learn that we are not popular on the
Continent.  Such a discovery comes to either a nation or an individual
like a douche of cold water on nice, warm conceit, and brings with it a
feeling of discouragement, of being unjustly treated, that is painful,
for we are very “touchy” in America, and cry out when a foreigner
expresses anything but admiration for our ways, yet we are the last to
lend ourselves to foreign customs.

It has been a home thrust for many of us to find that our dear friends
the French sympathized warmly with Spain in the recent struggle, and had
little but sneers for us.  One of the reasons for this partiality is not
hard to discover.

The Spanish who travel are mostly members of an aristocracy celebrated
for its grave courtesy, which has gone a long way toward making them
popular on the Continent, while we have for years been riding rough-shod
over the feelings and prejudices of the European peoples, under the
pleasing but fallacious illusion that the money we spent so lavishly in
foreign lands would atone for all our sins.  The large majority of our
travelling compatriots forget that an elaborate etiquette exists abroad
regulating the intercourse between one class and another, the result of
centuries of civilization, and as the Medic and Persian laws for
durability.  In our ignorance we break many of these social laws and give
offence where none was intended.

A single illustration will explain my meaning.  A young American girl
once went to the mistress of a _pension_ where she was staying and
complained that the _concierge_ of the house had been impertinent.  When
the proprietress asked the _concierge_ what this meant, the latter burst
out with her wrongs.  “Since Miss B. has been in this house, she has
never once bowed to me, or addressed a word to either my husband or
myself that was not a question or an order; she walks in and out of my
_loge_ to look for letters or take her key as though my room were the
street; I won’t stand such treatment from any one, much less from a girl.
The duchess who lives _au quatrième_ never passes without a kind word or
an inquiry after the children or my health.”

Now this American girl had erred through ignorance of the fact that in
France servants are treated as humble friends.  The man who brings your
matutinal coffee says “Good morning” on entering the room, and inquires
if “Monsieur has slept well,” expecting to be treated with the same
politeness he shows to you.

The lady who sits at the _caisse_ of the restaurant you frequent is as
sure of her position as her customers are of theirs, and exacts a
courteous salutation from every one entering or leaving her presence;
logically, for no gentleman would enter a ladies’ drawing-room without
removing his hat.  The fact that a woman is obliged to keep a shop in no
way relieves him of this obligation.

People on the Continent know their friends’ servants by name, and speak
to them on arriving at a house, and thank them for an opened door or
offered coat; if a tip is given it is accompanied by a gracious word.  So
rare is this form of civility in America and England (for Britons err as
gravely in this matter as ourselves) that our servants are surprised and
inclined to resent politeness, as in the case of an English butler who
recently came to his master and said he should be “obliged to leave.”  On
being questioned it came out that one of the guests was in the habit of
chatting with him, “and,” added the Briton, “I won’t stand being took
liberties with by no one.”

Some years ago I happened to be standing in the vestibule of the Hôtel
Bristol as the Princess of Wales and her daughters were leaving.  Mr.
Morlock, the proprietor, was at the foot of the stairs to take leave of
those ladies, who shook hands with and thanked him for his attention
during their stay, and for the flowers he had sent.  Nothing could have
been more gracious and freer from condescension than their manner, and it
undoubtedly produced the best impression.  The waiter who served me at
that time was also under their charm, and remarked several times that
“there had never been ladies so easy to please or so considerate of the
servants.”

My neighbor at dinner the other evening confided to me that she was “worn
out being fitted.”  “I had such an unpleasant experience this morning,”
she added.  “The _jupière_ could not get one of my skirts to hang
properly.  After a dozen attempts I told her to send for the forewoman,
when, to my horror, the girl burst out crying, and said she should lose
her place if I did.  I was very sorry for her, but what else could I do?”
It does not seem as if that lady could be very popular with inferiors,
does it?

That it needs a lighter hand and more tact to deal with tradespeople than
with equals is certain, and we are sure to be the losers when we fail.
The last time I was in the East a friend took me into the bazaars to see
a carpet he was anxious to buy.  The price asked was out of all
proportion to its value, but we were gravely invited by the merchant to
be seated and coffee was served, that bargaining (which is the backbone
of Oriental trade) might be carried on at leisure.  My friend, nervous
and impatient, like all our race, turned to me and said, “What’s all this
tomfoolery?  Tell him I’ll give so much for his carpet; he can take it or
leave it.”  When this was interpreted to the bearded tradesman, he smiled
and came down a few dollars in his price, and ordered more coffee.  By
this time we were outside his shop, and left without the carpet simply
because my friend could not conform to the customs of the country he was
visiting.  The sale of his carpet was a big affair for the Oriental; he
intended to carry it through with all the ceremony the occasion required,
and would sooner not make a sale than be hustled out of his stately
routine.

It is not only in intercourse with inferiors that tact is required.  The
treatment of children and young people in a family calls for delicate
handling.  The habit of taking liberties with young relations is a common
form of a relaxed social code and the besetting sin of elderly people,
who, having little to interest them in their own lives, imagine that
their mission is to reform the ways and manners of their family.
Ensconced behind the respect which the young are supposed to pay them,
they give free vent to inclination, and carp, cavil, and correct.  The
victims may have reached maturity or even middle age, but remain always
children to these social policemen, to be reproved and instructed in and
out of season.  “I am doing this for your own good,” is an excuse that
apparently frees the veterans from the necessity of respecting the
prejudices and feelings of their pupils, and lends a gloss of
unselfishness to actions which are simply impertinent.  Oddly enough,
amateur “schoolmarms” who fall into this unpleasant habit are generally
oversensitive, and resent as a personal affront any restlessness under
criticism on the part of their victims.  It is easy, once the habit is
acquired, to carry the suavity and consideration of general society into
the home circle, yet how often is it done?  I should like to see the
principle that ordered presentation of arms to the infant princess
applied to our intimate relations, and the rights of the young and
dependent scrupulously respected.

In the third act of _Caste_, when old Eccles steals the “coral” from his
grandson’s neck, he excuses the theft by a grandiloquent soliloquy, and
persuades himself that he is protecting “the weak and the humble”
(pointing to himself) “against the powerful and the strong” (pointing to
the baby).  Alas, too many of us take liberties with those whom we do not
fear, and excuse our little acts of cowardice with arguments as
fallacious as those of drunken old Eccles.




CHAPTER 18—What is “Art”?


In former years, we inquiring youngsters in foreign studios were much
bewildered by the repetition of a certain phrase.  Discussion of almost
any picture or statue was (after other forms of criticism had been
exhausted) pretty sure to conclude with, “It’s all very well in its way,
but it’s not Art.”  Not only foolish youths but the “masters” themselves
constantly advanced this opinion to crush a rival or belittle a friend.
To ardent minds seeking for the light and catching at every thread that
might serve as a guide out of perplexity, this vague assertion was
confusing.  According to one master, the eighteenth-century “school” did
not exist.  What had been produced at that time was pleasing enough to
the eye, but “was not Art!”  In the opinion of another, Italian music
might amuse or cheer the ignorant, but could not be recognized by serious
musicians.

As most of us were living far from home and friends for the purpose of
acquiring the rudiments of art, this continual sweeping away of our
foundations was discouraging.  What was the use, we sometimes asked
ourselves, of toiling, if our work was to be cast contemptuously aside by
the next “school” as a pleasing trifle, not for a moment to be taken
seriously?  How was one to find out the truth?  Who was to decide when
doctors disagreed?  Where was the rock on which an earnest student might
lay his cornerstone without the misgiving that the next wave in public
opinion would sap its base and cast him and his ideals out again at sea?

The eighteenth-century artists and the Italian composers had been sincere
and convinced that they were producing works of art.  In our own day the
idol of one moment becomes the jest of the next.  Was there, then, no
fixed law?

The short period, for instance, between 1875 and the present time has
been long enough for the talent of one painter (Bastien-Lepage) to be
discovered, discussed, lauded, acclaimed, then gradually forgotten and
decried.  During the years when we were studying in Paris, that young
painter’s works were pronounced by the critics and their following to be
the last development of Art.  Museums and amateurs vied with each other
in acquiring his canvases.  Yet, only this spring, while dining with two
or three art critics in the French capital, I heard Lepage’s name
mentioned and his works recalled with the smile that is accorded to those
who have hoodwinked the public and passed off spurious material as the
real thing.

If any one doubts the fleeting nature of a reputation, let him go to a
sale of modern pictures and note the prices brought by the favorites of
twenty years ago.  The paintings of that arch-priest, Meissonier, no
longer command the sums that eager collectors paid for them a score of
years back.  When a great European critic dares assert, as one has
recently, of the master’s “1815,” that “everything in the picture appears
metallic, except the cannon and the men’s helmets,” the mighty are indeed
fallen!  It is much the same thing with the old masters.  There have been
fashions in them as in other forms of art.  Fifty years ago Rembrandt’s
work brought but small prices, and until Henri Rochefort (during his
exile) began to write up the English school, Romneys, Lawrences, and
Gainsboroughs had little market value.

The result is that most of us are as far away from the solution of that
vexed question “What is Art?” at forty as we were when boys.  The
majority have arranged a compromise with their consciences.  We have
found out what we like (in itself no mean achievement), and beyond such
personal preference, are shy of asserting (as we were fond of doing
formerly) that such and such works are “Art,” and such others, while
pleasing and popular, lack the requisite qualities.

To enquiring minds, sure that an answer to this question exists, but
uncertain where to look for it, the fact that one of the thinkers of the
century has, in a recent “Evangel,” given to the world a definition of
“Art,” the result of many years’ meditation, will be received with joy.
“Art,” says Tolstoi, “is simply a condition of life.  It is any form of
expression that a human being employs to communicate an emotion he has
experienced to a fellow-mortal.”

An author who, in telling his hopes and so

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