What Is Man? and Other Essays
ostensible rest is devoted largely to rehearsing. It is said that the
off days are devoted to rehearsing from some time in the morning till
ten at night. Are there two orchestras also? It is quite likely, since
there are one hundred and ten names in the orchestra list.
Yesterday the opera was “Tristan and Isolde.” I have seen all sorts of
audiences—at theaters, operas, concerts, lectures, sermons,
funerals—but none which was twin to the Wagner audience of Bayreuth for
fixed and reverential attention. Absolute attention and petrified
retention to the end of an act of the attitude assumed at the beginning
of it. You detect no movement in the solid mass of heads and shoulders.
You seem to sit with the dead in the gloom of a tomb. You know that
they are being stirred to their profoundest depths; that there are
times when they want to rise and wave handkerchiefs and shout their
approbation, and times when tears are running down their faces, and it
would be a relief to free their pent emotions in sobs or screams; yet
you hear not one utterance till the curtain swings together and the
closing strains have slowly faded out and died; then the dead rise with
one impulse and shake the building with their applause. Every seat is
full in the first act; there is not a vacant one in the last. If a man
would be conspicuous, let him come here and retire from the house in
the midst of an act. It would make him celebrated.
This audience reminds me of nothing I have ever seen and of nothing I
have read about except the city in the Arabian tale where all the
inhabitants have been turned to brass and the traveler finds them after
centuries mute, motionless, and still retaining the attitudes which
they last knew in life. Here the Wagner audience dress as they please,
and sit in the dark and worship in silence. At the Metropolitan in New
York they sit in a glare, and wear their showiest harness; they hum
airs, they squeak fans, they titter, and they gabble all the time. In
some of the boxes the conversation and laughter are so loud as to
divide the attention of the house with the stage. In large measure the
Metropolitan is a show-case for rich fashionables who are not trained
in Wagnerian music and have no reverence for it, but who like to
promote art and show their clothes.
Can that be an agreeable atmosphere to persons in whom this music
produces a sort of divine ecstasy and to whom its creator is a very
deity, his stage a temple, the works of his brain and hands consecrated
things, and the partaking of them with eye and ear a sacred solemnity?
Manifestly, no. Then, perhaps the temporary expatriation, the tedious
traversing of seas and continents, the pilgrimage to Bayreuth stands
explained. These devotees would worship in an atmosphere of devotion.
It is only here that they can find it without fleck or blemish or any
worldly pollution. In this remote village there are no sights to see,
there is no newspaper to intrude the worries of the distant world,
there is nothing going on, it is always Sunday. The pilgrim wends to
his temple out of town, sits out his moving service, returns to his bed
with his heart and soul and his body exhausted by long hours of
tremendous emotion, and he is in no fit condition to do anything but to
lie torpid and slowly gather back life and strength for the next
service. This opera of “Tristan and Isolde” last night broke the hearts
of all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some who have
heard of many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I
feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the sane person
in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man
where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the
learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.
But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that this is one
of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I have never seen
anything like this before. I have never seen anything so great and fine
and real as this devotion.
FRIDAY.—Yesterday’s opera was “Parsifal” again. The others went and
they show marked advance in appreciation; but I went hunting for relics
and reminders of the Margravine Wilhelmina, she of the imperishable
“Memoirs.” I am properly grateful to her for her (unconscious) satire
upon monarchy and nobility, and therefore nothing which her hand
touched or her eye looked upon is indifferent to me. I am her pilgrim;
the rest of this multitude here are Wagner’s.
TUESDAY.—I have seen my last two operas; my season is ended, and we
cross over into Bohemia this afternoon. I was supposing that my musical
regeneration was accomplished and perfected, because I enjoyed both of
these operas, singing and all, and, moreover, one of them was
“Parsifal,” but the experts have disenchanted me. They say:
“Singing! That wasn’t singing; that was the wailing, screeching of
third-rate obscurities, palmed off on us in the interest of economy.”
Well, I ought to have recognized the sign—the old, sure sign that has
never failed me in matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it
means that it is mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has
saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many
a chromo. However, my base instinct does bring me profit sometimes; I
was the only man out of thirty-two hundred who got his money back on
those two operas.
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Is it true that the sun of a man’s mentality touches noon at forty and
then begins to wane toward setting? Doctor Osler is charged with saying
so. Maybe he said it, maybe he didn’t; I don’t know which it is. But if
he said it, I can point him to a case which proves his rule. Proves it
by being an exception to it. To this place I nominate Mr. Howells.
I read his _Venetian Days_ about forty years ago. I compare it with his
paper on Machiavelli in a late number of _Harper_, and I cannot find
that his English has suffered any impairment. For forty years his
English has been to me a continual delight and astonishment. In the
sustained exhibition of certain great qualities—clearness, compression,
verbal exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of
phrasing—he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English-writing
world. _sustained_. I entrench myself behind that protecting word.
There are others who exhibit those great qualities as greatly as he
does, but only by intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with
stretches of veiled and dimmer landscape between; whereas Howells’s
moon sails cloudless skies all night and all the nights.
In the matter of verbal exactness Mr. Howells has no superior, I
suppose. He seems to be almost always able to find that elusive and
shifty grain of gold, the _right word._ Others have to put up with
approximations, more or less frequently; he has better luck. To me, the
others are miners working with the gold-pan—of necessity some of the
gold washes over and escapes; whereas, in my fancy, he is quicksilver
raiding down a riffle—no grain of the metal stands much chance of
eluding him. A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader’s
way and makes it plain; a close approximation to it will answer, and
much traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do
not welcome it and applaud it and rejoice in it as we do when _the
_right one blazes out on us. Whenever we come upon one of those
intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is
physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt: it tingles
exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and tastes as tart
and crisp and good as the autumn-butter that creams the sumac-berry.
One has no time to examine the word and vote upon its rank and
standing, the automatic recognition of its supremacy is so immediate.
There is a plenty of acceptable literature which deals largely in
approximations, but it may be likened to a fine landscape seen through
the rain; the right word would dismiss the rain, then you would see it
better. It doesn’t rain when Howells is at work.
And where does he get the easy and effortless flow of his speech? and
its cadenced and undulating rhythm? and its architectural felicities of
construction, its graces of expression, its pemmican quality of
compression, and all that? Born to him, no doubt. All in shining good
order in the beginning, all extraordinary; and all just as shining,
just as extraordinary today, after forty years of diligent wear and
tear and use. He passed his fortieth year long and long ago; but I
think his English of today—his perfect English, I wish to say—can throw
down the glove before his English of that antique time and not be
afraid.
I will go back to the paper on Machiavelli now, and ask the reader to
examine this passage from it which I append. I do not mean examine it
in a bird’s-eye way; I mean search it, study it. And, of course, read
it aloud. I may be wrong, still it is my conviction that one cannot get
out of finely wrought literature all that is in it by reading it
mutely:
_Mr. Dyer is rather of the opinion, first luminously suggested by
Macaulay, that Machiavelli was in earnest, but must not be judged as a
political moralist of our time and race would be judged. He thinks that
Machiavelli was in earnest, as none but an idealist can be, and he is
the first to imagine him an idealist immersed in realities, who
involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into something like
the visionary issues of reverie. The Machiavelli whom he depicts does
not cease to be politically a republican and socially a just man
because he holds up an atrocious despot like Caesar Borgia as a mirror
for rulers. What Machiavelli beheld round him in Italy was a civic
disorder in which there was oppression without statecraft, and revolt
without patriotism. When a miscreant like Borgia appeared upon the
scene and reduced both tyrants and rebels to an apparent quiescence, he
might very well seem to such a dreamer the savior of society whom a
certain sort of dreamers are always looking for. Machiavelli was no
less honest when he honored the diabolical force of Caesar Borgia than
Carlyle was when at different times he extolled the strong man who
destroys liberty in creating order. But Carlyle has only just ceased to
be mistaken for a reformer, while it is still Machiavelli’s hard fate
to be so trammeled in his material that his name stands for whatever is
most malevolent and perfidious in human nature._
You see how easy and flowing it is; how unvexed by ruggednesses,
clumsinesses, broken meters; how simple and—so far as you or I can make
out—unstudied; how clear, how limpid, how understandable, how
unconfused by cross-currents, eddies, undertows; how seemingly
unadorned, yet is all adornment, like the lily-of-the-valley; and how
compressed, how compact, without a complacency-signal hung out anywhere
to call attention to it.
There are twenty-three lines in the quoted passage. After reading it
several times aloud, one perceives that a good deal of matter is
crowded into that small space. I think it is a model of compactness.
When I take its materials apart and work them over and put them
together in my way, I find I cannot crowd the result back into the same
hole, there not being room enough. I find it a case of a woman packing
a man’s trunk: he can get the things out, but he can’t ever get them
back again.
The proffered paragraph is a just and fair sample; the rest of the
article is as compact as it is; there are no waste words. The sample is
just in other ways: limpid, fluent, graceful, and rhythmical as it is,
it holds no superiority in these respects over the rest of the essay.
Also, the choice phrasing noticeable in the sample is not lonely; there