What Is Man? and Other Essays
busy yesterday and I did not intend to go, knowing I should have
another “Tannhauser” opportunity in a few days; but after five o’clock
I found myself free and walked out to the opera-house and arrived about
the beginning of the second act. My opera ticket admitted me to the
grounds in front, past the policeman and the chain, and I thought I
would take a rest on a bench for an hour and two and wait for the third
act.
In a moment or so the first bugles blew, and the multitude began to
crumble apart and melt into the theater. I will explain that this
bugle-call is one of the pretty features here. You see, the theater is
empty, and hundreds of the audience are a good way off in the
feeding-house; the first bugle-call is blown about a quarter of an hour
before time for the curtain to rise. This company of buglers, in
uniform, march out with military step and send out over the landscape a
few bars of the theme of the approaching act, piercing the distances
with the gracious notes; then they march to the other entrance and
repeat. Presently they do this over again. Yesterday only about two
hundred people were still left in front of the house when the second
call was blown; in another half-minute they would have been in the
house, but then a thing happened which delayed them—the only solitary
thing in this world which could be relied on with certainty to
accomplish this, I suppose—an imperial princess appeared in the balcony
above them. They stopped dead in their tracks and began to gaze in a
stupor of gratitude and satisfaction. The lady presently saw that she
must disappear or the doors would be closed upon these worshipers, so
she returned to her box. This daughter-in-law of an emperor was pretty;
she had a kind face; she was without airs; she is known to be full of
common human sympathies. There are many kinds of princesses, but this
kind is the most harmful of all, for wherever they go they reconcile
people to monarchy and set back the clock of progress. The valuable
princes, the desirable princes, are the czars and their sort. By their
mere dumb presence in the world they cover with derision every argument
that can be invented in favor of royalty by the most ingenious casuist.
In his time the husband of this princess was valuable. He led a
degraded life, he ended it with his own hand in circumstances and
surroundings of a hideous sort, and was buried like a god.
In the opera-house there is a long loft back of the audience, a kind of
open gallery, in which princes are displayed. It is sacred to them; it
is the holy of holies. As soon as the filling of the house is about
complete the standing multitude turn and fix their eyes upon the
princely layout and gaze mutely and longingly and adoringly and
regretfully like sinners looking into heaven. They become rapt,
unconscious, steeped in worship. There is no spectacle anywhere that is
more pathetic than this. It is worth crossing many oceans to see. It is
somehow not the same gaze that people rivet upon a Victor Hugo, or
Niagara, or the bones of the mastodon, or the guillotine of the
Revolution, or the great pyramid, or distant Vesuvius smoking in the
sky, or any man long celebrated to you by his genius and achievements,
or thing long celebrated to you by the praises of books and
pictures—no, that gaze is only the gaze of intense curiosity, interest,
wonder, engaged in drinking delicious deep draughts that taste good all
the way down and appease and satisfy the thirst of a lifetime. Satisfy
it—that is the word. Hugo and the mastodon will still have a degree of
intense interest thereafter when encountered, but never anything
approaching the ecstasy of that first view. The interest of a prince is
different. It may be envy, it may be worship, doubtless it is a mixture
of both—and it does not satisfy its thirst with one view, or even
noticeably diminish it. Perhaps the essence of the thing is the value
which men attach to a valuable something which has come by luck and not
been earned. A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to you
than the ninety-and-nine which you had to work for, and money won at
faro or in stocks snuggles into your heart in the same way. A prince
picks up grandeur, power, and a permanent holiday and gratis support by
a pure accident, the accident of birth, and he stands always before the
grieved eye of poverty and obscurity a monumental representative of
luck. And then—supremest value of all-his is the only high fortune on
the earth which is secure. The commercial millionaire may become a
beggar; the illustrious statesman can make a vital mistake and be
dropped and forgotten; the illustrious general can lose a decisive
battle and with it the consideration of men; but once a prince always a
prince—that is to say, an imitation god, and neither hard fortune nor
an infamous character nor an addled brain nor the speech of an ass can
undeify him. By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the
most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether
deserved or undeserved. It follows without doubt or question, then,
that the most desirable position possible is that of a prince. And I
think it also follows that the so-called usurpations with which history
is littered are the most excusable misdemeanors which men have
committed. To usurp a usurpation—that is all it amounts to, isn’t it?
A prince is not to us what he is to a European, of course. We have not
been taught to regard him as a god, and so one good look at him is
likely to so nearly appease our curiosity as to make him an object of
no greater interest the next time. We want a fresh one. But it is not
so with the European. I am quite sure of it. The same old one will
answer; he never stales. Eighteen years ago I was in London and I
called at an Englishman’s house on a bleak and foggy and dismal
December afternoon to visit his wife and married daughter by
appointment. I waited half an hour and then they arrived, frozen. They
explained that they had been delayed by an unlooked-for circumstance:
while passing in the neighborhood of Marlborough House they saw a crowd
gathering and were told that the Prince of Wales was about to drive
out, so they stopped to get a sight of him. They had waited half an
hour on the sidewalk, freezing with the crowd, but were disappointed at
last—the Prince had changed his mind. I said, with a good deal of
surprise, “Is it possible that you two have lived in London all your
lives and have never seen the Prince of Wales?”
Apparently it was their turn to be surprised, for they exclaimed: “What
an idea! Why, we have seen him hundreds of times.”
They had seen him hundreds of times, yet they had waited half an hour
in the gloom and the bitter cold, in the midst of a jam of patients
from the same asylum, on the chance of seeing him again. It was a
stupefying statement, but one is obliged to believe the English, even
when they say a thing like that. I fumbled around for a remark, and got
out this one:
“I can’t understand it at all. If I had never seen General Grant I
doubt if I would do that even to get a sight of him.” With a slight
emphasis on the last word.
Their blank faces showed that they wondered where the parallel came in.
Then they said, blankly: “Of course not. He is only a President.”
It is doubtless a fact that a prince is a permanent interest, an
interest not subject to deterioration. The general who was never
defeated, the general who never held a council of war, the only general
who ever commanded a connected battle-front twelve hundred miles long,
the smith who welded together the broken parts of a great republic and
re-established it where it is quite likely to outlast all the
monarchies present and to come, was really a person of no serious
consequence to these people. To them, with their training, my General
was only a man, after all, while their Prince was clearly much more
than that—a being of a wholly unsimilar construction and constitution,
and being of no more blood and kinship with men than are the serene
eternal lights of the firmament with the poor dull tallow candles of
commerce that sputter and die and leave nothing behind but a pinch of
ashes and a stink.
I saw the last act of “Tannhauser.” I sat in the gloom and the deep
stillness, waiting—one minute, two minutes, I do not know exactly how
long—then the soft music of the hidden orchestra began to breathe its
rich, long sighs out from under the distant stage, and by and by the
drop-curtain parted in the middle and was drawn softly aside,
disclosing the twilighted wood and a wayside shrine, with a white-robed
girl praying and a man standing near. Presently that noble chorus of
men’s voices was heard approaching, and from that moment until the
closing of the curtain it was music, just music—music to make one drunk
with pleasure, music to make one take scrip and staff and beg his way
round the globe to hear it.
To such as are intending to come here in the Wagner season next year I
wish to say, bring your dinner-pail with you. If you do, you will never
cease to be thankful. If you do not, you will find it a hard fight to
save yourself from famishing in Bayreuth. Bayreuth is merely a large
village, and has no very large hotels or eating-houses. The principal
inns are the Golden Anchor and the Sun. At either of these places you
can get an excellent meal—no, I mean you can go there and see other
people get it. There is no charge for this. The town is littered with
restaurants, but they are small and bad, and they are overdriven with
custom. You must secure a table hours beforehand, and often when you
arrive you will find somebody occupying it. We have had this
experience. We have had a daily scramble for life; and when I say we, I
include shoals of people. I have the impression that the only people
who do not have to scramble are the veterans—the disciples who have
been here before and know the ropes. I think they arrive about a week
before the first opera, and engage all the tables for the season. My
tribe had tried all kinds of places—some outside of the town, a mile or
two—and have captured only nibblings and odds and ends, never in any
instance a complete and satisfying meal. Digestible? No, the reverse.
These odds and ends are going to serve as souvenirs of Bayreuth, and in
that regard their value is not to be overestimated. Photographs fade,
bric-a-brac gets lost, busts of Wagner get broken, but once you absorb
a Bayreuth-restaurant meal it is your possession and your property
until the time comes to embalm the rest of you. Some of these pilgrims
here become, in effect, cabinets; cabinets of souvenirs of Bayreuth. It
is believed among scientists that you could examine the crop of a dead
Bayreuth pilgrim anywhere in the earth and tell where he came from. But
I like this ballast. I think a “Hermitage” scrap-up at eight in the
evening, when all the famine-breeders have been there and laid in their
mementoes and gone, is the quietest thing you can lay on your keelson
except gravel.
THURSDAY.—They keep two teams of singers in stock for the chief roles,
and one of these is composed of the most renowned artists in the world,
with Materna and Alvary in the lead. I suppose a double team is
necessary; doubtless a single team would die of exhaustion in a week,
for all the plays last from four in the afternoon till ten at night.
Nearly all the labor falls upon the half-dozen head singers, and
apparently they are required to furnish all the noise they can for the
money. If they feel a soft, whispery, mysterious feeling they are
required to open out and let the public know it. Operas are given only
on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, with three days of
ostensible rest per week, and two teams to do the four operas; but the