Part 9

"When the Belgian artist played it, I listened in vain for Dodona. What I heard was the rustling of silken tones through the wood of the chairs and tables at the Carlton. Where was the Oracle? Where the chorus of the priests? Where their jubilation? The only thing that I found were my regrets. But the public was charmed. It is imperative to admire the _Chaconne_, chiefly because it is played Violin _solo_. Mrs Blazing explained the matter to me with her wonted rapidity of mind: 'Why wonder at our admiration of the _Chaconne_? Do we not say: "_Chacun à son goût_?"'

"The next artist was a pianist, whose name sounded like Pianowolsky or Forterewsky. He was of course a Pole. The English have long found out that -welsky or -ewsky goes with the name of a great pianist, as the pedal goes with the piano. It was for this reason that Liszt, the Orpheus of the last century, never had any success in England. He ought to have called himself Franzescowitch Lisztobulszky, and then, no doubt, he would have scored heavily. Rubinstein had indeed much success in England, but it is patent that most English took his official name as a mere abbreviation of Ruben Ishnajewich Stonehammercrushowsky. The English taste in music is remarkable; it is somewhat like their taste in fruit. They prefer hothouse grapes to natural ones. In the same way they prefer the piano music of Mendelmeier, called Bartholdy, to that of Stephen Heller or Volkmann. What they more particularly like are the 'Songs without Words' of that composer, which in reality are _Words without Songs_. His piano music is nothing but congealed respectability, or frozen _shockingitis_."

Aristoxenus, interrupting Alcibiades, exclaimed: "Do not, O son of Clinias, forget the man's marvellous compositions for the violin as well as for the orchestra. Diana frequently commands his _Midsummer Night's Dream_ when she dwells with her nymphs in the mystic forest near Farnham Common, where Bartholdy composed it under the trees of Canute."

"You are quite right, O master of all Harmony, and I want to speak only of his piano music. The pianist at the concert had a very fine profile and beautiful hair. This helped him very much in a country where the sense of stylishness is exceedingly acute. A coachman must have a broad back; a pianist, a fine profile; a violinist, long legs; a 'cellist, beautiful hands; and a lady singer, a vast promontory. Once these indispensable qualities are given, his or her music is practically a matter of indifference.

"The pianist then performing played well, as long as he played _forte_ and _staccato_; but he had neither a _legato_ nor, what was fatal, a _piano_, let alone a _pianissimo_. Fortunately his sense of rhythm was very well developed; otherwise he did not rise above a first prizeman of a conservatory.

"He played a transcription or two by Liszt. This the English condemn; it appears unlegitimate to them. To please them, one must play one of the last sonatas of Beethoven, preferably those composed after his death, that is, those that the man wrote when he had long lost the power of moulding his ideas in the cast of a sonata, and when his vitality had been ebbing away for years. A transcription stands to the original as does an engraving of an oil-colour picture or a statue to its original. Most people will enjoy a fine engraving of the _Transfiguration_ or of Our Lady of Milo much more readily than they would the original; just as I now know that you gave us, O Zeus, great artists like Scopas, Praxiteles, Lionardo, or Domenichino, because we could not bear, nor comprehend the sight of the originals of their divine art, as long as we still move in our mortal coil. The transcription of some of the ideas of Mozart's _Don Juan_ by Liszt is the best and most illuminating commentary on that incomparable opera.

"More interesting than the play were the remarks which I overheard from among the public. The men dwelt exclusively on the big sums of money the pianist made by his 1526 recitals in 2000 towns of the United States. The profits they credited him with ranged from £15,000 to £100,000. A Viennese banker present drily remarked that he wished he could play the difference between the real and the imagined profits of the virtuoso on a fine Erard piano. The women made quite different remarks. Said one:

"'Herr Pianoforterewsky has been painted by royalty.'

"'Is that so?' said her neighbour. 'What an interesting face! I wish I could procure a photo of the picture.'

"'Do you know,' said a third, 'that Herr Pinaforewsky practises twenty-three hours a day? I know it on the best authority; his tuner told me so.'

"'Which tuner? Herr Pinacothekowsky, my dear, has three tuners: one for the high notes, the second for the middle ones, and the third for the low notes.'

"'How interesting! But suppose one of the tuners falls ill. What does he do then?'

"'Why, it's simple enough. In that case he only plays pieces requiring two of the three ranges of notes.'

"'How intensely interesting! But pray, if you do not take it amiss, my dear, I learnt that Herr Pedalewsky has only two tuners: one for the black keys, the other for the white ones.'

"'My dear, that was so in bygone times when he played sometimes a whole concert on the black keys alone, being 231 variations on Chopin's _Etude_ on the black keys. But it made such a sad impression that some nasty critics said his piano was in mourning black; other critics said that he was paid to do so by Mr Jay of Regent Street.'

"'How excruciatingly interesting! Do you know, my dear, I was told that Herr Polonorusky plays practically all the time, and even when he travels he carries with him a dumb piano on which he practises incessantly.'

"'How touching! I have heard that too, and believed it, until that atrocious man who writes for the _Bad Times_ destroyed all my illusions. He said that if Herr Pantyrewsky did that, he would for ever spoil his touch. Just fancy that! It is not the touch, but the pose of that languid, Chopinesque profile over a dumb piano in a rattling car that was so interesting. And now that horrid journalist spoils it all. Nay, he added that the whole story was deliberately invented by the artist's manager.'

"'How distressingly interesting! You know, my dear, I will not believe the story about the manager. I know too much about the wonderful pianist. I have learnt at Marienbad that he had ten teachers at a time, one for each of his fingers, and that for five years he lived in a tiny village in Bavaria, because, don't you see, it was so central for the ten different cities where his teachers lived. For the thumb he rushed off to Frankfort on the Maine. There is no town like Frankfort for the study of the thumb. That's why they make such excellent sausages there which resemble a thumb to perfection. For the index he went to Rome. And so forth and so on. It is most marvellous.'

"All during that time," Alcibiades continued, "the pianist was playing the moonlight sonata of Beethoven. At the end of the piece, the ladies who had carried on the lively conversation applauded wildly. 'Was it not marvellous?' said one to the other. 'Oh--delightful!' was the answer.

"So ended the concert. On leaving my seat I met Mrs Blazing.

"'_O mon cher_,' she said, 'why do all these women pretend to enjoy music? They very well know that not one of them cares for it in the least. I frankly admit that music to me is the anarchy of air, the French Revolution of sounds, acoustic bankruptcy. All our lives we have been taught to suppress our emotions, and to consider it ungenteel to express them in any way whatever. We were told that we must hide and suppress them--which we have done so successfully that after some time we resemble to a nicety the famous safe of Madame Humbert. And then, in flagrant contradiction to all this genteel education, we are supposed to accept with joy the moanings, cries, sobs, sighs, and other unsuppressed emotions of some middle-class Dutchman or Teuton dished up to us in the form of a sonata. It is too absurd for words.

"'If that lower-middle-class Dutchman Beethoven (or as my Cynthia calls him: "_Bête au vent_") wants to exhale his moral distress and sentimental indigestion, let him do so by all means, but in a lonely room. Why does he interfere with the even tenor of our well-varnished life? If my charming Japanese china figures, or my pretty girls and shepherds in _vieux Saxe_ suddenly began to roar out their sentiments, I should have them destroyed or sold without any further ado. Why should I accept such roarings from an ugly, beer-drinking, unmannered Teuton? Why, I ask you?'

"'Music is the art of poor nations and poor classes. Outside a few Jews, no great musician came from among the rich classes; and Jews are socially impoverished. I can understand the attraction of ditties nursed in the music halls. They fan one with a gentle breeze of light tones, and here and there tickle a nerve or two. But what on earth shall we do with such _plesiosauri_ as the monsters they call symphonies, in which fifty or sixty instruments go amuck in fifty different ways? The flute tries to serpentine round the bassoon in order to instil in it drops of deadly poison; the violins gallop recklessly _à la_ Mazeppa against and over the violas and 'celli, while the brass darts forth glowing bombs falling with cruelty into the finest flower-beds of oboes and harps. It is simply the hoax of the century. Would you at Athens ever have endured such a pandemonium?'

"'You are quite right, _ma très charmante dame_,' I said, 'we never had such music and we should have little cared for it. Our way of making symphonies was to write epics, crowded with persons, divine and human, and with events and incidents of all colours and shades. The Continental nations have lost the epic creativeness proper, and must therefore write epics in sound. Just as your languages do not allow you to write very strictly metred poetry such as we have written without impairing the fire and glamour of poetry, and the only way left for you of imitating the severe metres of Archilochus, Alcæus or Sappho is in the form of musical canons, fugues, or other counterpointed music. It seems to me that you English have not done much by way of music epics, because, like ourselves, you were busily engaged in writing epics of quite a different kind: the epic of your Empire. The nations that have written musical epics, did do so at a time when these were the only epics they could write,--the symphony of Empire being refused them.'

"'I see,' said Mrs Blazing. 'You mean to say that our Mozarts and Beethovens are Lord Chatham, Clive, Nelson and Wellington?'

"'In a manner, yes. Few nations, if any, can excel both in arts and in Empire-making, and had you English been able to hold in your imperial power considerable parts of Europe, say, of France, Germany or Spain, you would never have had either Walter Scott or Byron, Shelley or Tennyson. For the efforts required to conquer and hold European territory would have taxed all your strength so severely that no resources would have been left for conquests in the realm of the arts and literature.

"'This is why the Romans, who conquered, not coloured races, but the mightiest white nations, could never write either great epics or great dramas. They wrote only one epic, one drama of first and to this day unparalleled magnitude: the Roman Empire. I meant to do a similar thing for Athens, but I failed. I now know why. My real enemies were not in the camp of my political adversaries, but in the theatre of Dionysus and in the schools of the philosophers. Do not, therefore, _ma chère amie_, begrudge the Germans their great musicians. They are really very great, and not even your greatest minds surpass, perhaps do not even equal them. Your consolation may be in this, that the Germans too will soon cease writing music worth the hearing. They now want to write quite different epics. And no nation can write two sorts of epics at a time.'

"'I am so glad to hear you say so,' said Mrs Blazing. 'It relieves me of a _corvée_ that I hitherto considered to be a patriotic duty. I mean, I will henceforth never attend the representations of the new school of _soi-disant_ English music. Inwardly I never liked it; it always appeared to me like an Englishwoman who tries to imitate the _grâce_ and _verve_ of a Parisian woman, with all her easy gestures, vivacious conversation, and delicate coquetry. It will not do.

"'We English women do not shine in movement; our sphere is repose. We may be troublesome, but never _troublante_.

"'Even so is English academic music. And I now see why it must be so. It is not in us, because another force takes its place. Like all people we like to shine in that wherein we are most deficient, and the other day I was present at a scene that could hardly be more painful. At the house of a rich and highly distinguished city man I met the famous Sir Somebody Hangar, the composer. The question arose who was the greatest musician? Thereupon Sir Somebody, looking up to the beautiful ceiling of the room, exclaimed dreamily: "Music is of _very_ recent origin...." One of the gentlemen present then asked Sir Somebody whether he had ever heard the reply given to that question by the great Gounod? Sir Somebody contemptuously uttered: "Gounod? It is not worth hearing." I was indignant, and pointedly asked the gentleman to tell us Gounod's reply. The gentleman, looking at Sir Somebody with a curious smile, related:

"'Gounod, on being asked who in his opinion was the greatest musician, said: "When I was a boy of twenty, I said: _moi_. Ten years later I said: _moi et Mozart_. Again ten years later I said: _Mozart et moi_. And now I say: _Mozart_."'

"This reply," said Alcibiades, "has Attic perfume in it. Having suffered so much, as I have, at the hands of musicians in my time, when dramatic writers were as much musicians as dramatists, I have in my Olympian leisure carefully inquired into the real causes of the rise of modern music.

"'You said a few moments ago, _ma très spirituelle dame_, that music is the art of poor classes. There is this much truth in that, that modern music has indeed been almost entirely in the hands of middle-class people. This being so, everything depends on the nature and dispositions of the middle class in a given country. In England, for instance, the middle class is totally different from that of France or that of South Germany, the home of German music. The English middle class is cold, dry, _gaffeur_ to the extreme, afflicted with a veritable rage for outward respectability, unsufferably formalist, and deeply convinced of its social inferiority. In such a class nothing remotely resembling German or French music can ever possibly arise. Such a class furnishes excellent business men, and reliable sergeants to the officers of imperial work. But music can no more grow out of it than can a rose out of a poker.

"'This middle class is the result of British Imperialism, and this is how Imperialism has prevented and will, as long as it lasts, always prevent the rise of really fine music in the higher sense of the term. This is also why we Hellenes never achieved greater results in music. Like the English, or the Americans, we never had a real _bourgeoisie_, or the only possible foster-earth of great music. However, _bourgeoisie_ is only a historic phenomenon, one that is destined to disappear, and with it will disappear all music. Mr Richard Strauss is singing its dirge.'"

When Alcibiades had finished his entertaining tale of women and music in England, the gods and heroes congratulated him warmly, and Zeus ordered that, under the direction of Mozart, all the nymphs and goddesses of the forests and seas shall sing one of the motets of Bach. This they did, and all Venice was filled with the magic songs, which were as pure as those produced by the nymph Echo in the Baptistry at Pisa. All the palaces and the churches of Venice seemed to listen with melancholy pleasure, and St Mark's hesitated to sound the hour lest the spell should be broken. When the motet was ended, the gods and heroes rose and disappeared in the heavens.

THE FIFTH NIGHT

CÆSAR ON THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

On the fifth night the gods and heroes assembled in the city of Rome. Their meeting-place was the Forum. The eternal city lay dormant around them, and Zeus, who had for the time recalled into existence the magnificent temple built in his honour, which used to adorn the incomparable centre of Roman might and splendour, sat in front of it, surrounded by the Flamines and the last Pontifex Maximus aided by the last Vestal Virgins. On the _via sacra_ there was an unending flow of thronging Romans and Greeks, and Cicero was seen talking with great animation with Julius Cæsar, while Augustus seemed to chide Tacitus with mild irony. Cornelius Scipio Africanus was deeply engaged in a conversation with Pericles, and Marcus Antistius Labeo discussed law with Plato. From afar the wind brought the sounds of the bells of the Vatican, at the hearing of which all conversation stopped; and when a few minutes later a choir intoned a hymn in a neighbouring church, the Pontifex and the Flamines veiled their heads in dumb resignation, and the Vestal Virgins looked up to Zeus as if imploring him for help. A pause followed. But soon the moon rose over the majestic Palatine hill; the Graces performed a soulful dance, and finally Zeus asked Caius Julius Cæsar to entertain them with his experiences during his third travel in England which, as he said, he had, in addition to his two landings during his mortal life, recently made after nearly two thousand years.

Cæsar, standing near the house of the Senate of ancient Rome, thus addressed the divine Assembly:

"It is, O Jupiter and all the other gods and heroes, a singular pleasure and honour to me to address you on a topic so important and interesting. When I arrived in England for the third time (--I started from Dunkerque to avoid giving offence to the 112 scholars who have, each to his complete satisfaction, proved 112 different spots on the French coast between Boulogne and Calais wherefrom I am supposed to have started for England in my mortal time--) I was received by no wilder tribe than a few customs officials, who asked me whether I had any cigars in my toga. On my denying it, they searched me, and finding none they let me go. Two hours later I arrived in London, which I found ugly beyond words. I can understand that you, O Canova, cried on seeing it. What struck me most was its surprising silence, which contrasted very strongly with the noise of Rome, or Paris. I mentioned this to a casual acquaintance, who stared at me in despair, exclaiming: 'Silence, sir? Why, the noises of London drive half of us to madness. Here, take that (--he handed me a bunch of printed papers--) read it carefully and join us.' On looking into the papers I found that they contained a prospectus of a vast 'Society for the Abatement of Street-Noises in London.'

"This made me somewhat thoughtful. It was quite clear to me that the unattractiveness of London is owing chiefly to its lack of animation, to its silence. I soon found out that silence is the dominating institution of that country. To talk is to infringe the principal law of their language. They want to see their language noiselessly, and not to hear it. Hence they constantly read printed language on wooden paper, in a wooden style, on wooden matters. This they call 'the daily Press.' I met one of the chief writers on their most popular paper, and he assured me that the editor solemnly warns each of his contributors not to indulge in any attempt at _esprit_ or brilliancy of any sort; for, should he do so, the editor would be forced to dismiss him forthwith. All that the contributor is allowed to do is to make startling headlines, such as:

'Delicious puddings made out of wood.'

'New aqueducts full of milk for the people.'

'Discovery of wireless telegraphy among the ancient Egyptians.'

'Discovery of the pin-cushion to Cleopatra's needles.'

'Trunk murder: a man assassinates his widow.'

That same editor, on my asking him why he allowed such crying stupidities in the headlines, and nothing but the most platitudinous stuff in the body of the article, gave me the following answer:

"'My dear sir, our public has nerves but no intellect. Hence we work for sudden, rapid shocks to their nerves, and no fatigue to their intellect. They not only do not think; they do not want to think. They are practically convinced that thinking is the perdition of all common-sense. Just let me give you an example. There is among the younger writers one whose mind is singularly suggestive and nimble. He really has something to say, and can say it well. However, unfortunately, he says it in what are, apparently, contradictory and circuitous terms. This my readers cannot grasp; it fatigues them. They complain of that man's writings as being "heavy," "hard to follow." This is the consequence of the vogue of music halls. One may say that the popular University of this country, where the average man gets most of his ideas from, is the music hall. What, then, can we editors do better than imitate the style and substance of the music hall? Shocks to the nerves--and no fatigue to the intellect. _Voilà!_'

* * * * *

"On my way home I met Columbus. He told me, and no man ever spoke with more solid right, that he was the greatest benefactor to England. But for him, who by discovering the New World placed England in the very centre of the intelligent and wealthy nations, while formerly England was somewhere on the 'other end of all the world'; but for him, he said, England could never have had her unique leverage. 'You, Cæsar,' he added, 'discovered England, as the Vikings discovered America; I did not discover it, I made it. But would you believe me that thousands and thousands of Englishmen have scarcely ever heard my name? They constantly talk of their race as born to rule. But what would they have ruled without me? The ponds in Lincolnshire. You wonder at their tongue-tiedness. I will tell you what it means. The English are neither talkers nor thinkers; they are almost exclusively men of action; or used to be. They have no intellectual initiative. They have started neither the Renascence, nor the Great Discoveries of my time, nor the Reformation, or the three greatest factors in the formation of modern Europe. All this was first started by us Italians. We can both talk and think and create; but we are not good at actions. The English are good only at action. This is the be-all and end-all of their history. Have you ever seen their Parliament? Do not omit attending it. You will there learn something that no other Assembly can teach you. It rarely contains a great orator, for oratory is of little use in an Assembly with an iron party discipline, and with members every one of whom is amenable to no argument that has not had the august privilege of being born in his own mind. And since his mind brings forth none, he moves in a vicious circle!'

"'Would you not,' I asked Columbus, 'accompany me to the House of Commons?'

"'Readily,' said the great Genoese. And next day we repaired to the 'first club of the country.'

* * * * *