Part 7

Sometimes I think, and especially when I am at a meeting where they have what they call reminiscences, that a world with death in it is a mistake. What would you think of a man who built a railroad, knowing that every passenger was to be killed--knowing that there was no escape? What would you think of the cheerfulness of the passengers if every one knew that at some station, the name of which had not been called out, there was a hearse waiting for him; backed up there, horses fighting flies, driver whistling, waiting for you? Is it not wonderful that the passengers on that train really enjoy themselves? Is it not magnificent that every one of them, under perpetual sentence of death, after all, can dimple their cheeks with laughter; that we, every one doomed to become dust, can yet meet around this table as full of joy as spring is full of life, as full of hope as the heavens are full of stars?

I tell you we have got a good deal of pluck.

And yet, after all, what would this world be without death? It may be from the fact that we are all victims, from the fact that we are all bound by common fate; it may be that friendship and love are born of that fact; but Whatever the fact is, I am perfectly satisfied that the highest possible philosophy is to enjoy to-day, not regretting yesterday, and not fearing to-morrow. So, let us suck this orange of life dry, so that when death does come, we can politely say to him, "You are welcome to the peelings. What little there was we have enjoyed."

But there is one splendid thing about the play called Life. Suppose that when you die, that is the end. The last thing that you will know is that you are alive, and the last thing that will happen to you is the curtain, not falling, but the curtain rising on another thought, so that as far as your consciousness is concerned you will and must live forever. No man can remember when he commenced, and no man can remember when he ends. As far as we are concerned we live both eternities, the one past and the one to come, and it is a delight to me to feel satisfied, and to feel in my own heart, that I can never be certain that I have seen the faces I love for the last time.

When I am at such a gathering as this, I almost wish I had had the making of the world. What a world I would have made! In that world unhappiness would have been the only sin; melancholy the only crime; joy the only virtue. And whether there is another world, nobody knows. Nobody can affirm it; nobody can deny it. Nobody can collect tolls from me, claiming that he owns a turnpike, and nobody can certainly say that the crooked path that I follow, beside which many roses are growing, does not lead to that place. He doesn't know. But if there is such a place, I hope that all good fellows will be welcome.

MANHATTAN ATHLETIC CLUB DINNER.

New York, December 27, 1890.

TOAST: ATHLETICS AMONG THE ANCIENTS.

THE first record of public games is found in the twentythird Book of the Iliad. These games were performed at the funeral of Patroclus, and there were:

First. A chariot race, and the first prize was:

"A woman fair, well skilled in household care."

Second. There was a pugilistic encounter, and the first prize, appropriately enough, was a mule.

It gave me great pleasure to find that Homer did not hold in high esteem the victor. I have reached this conclusion, because the poet put these words in the mouth of Eppius, the great boxer winding up with the following refined declaration concerning his opponent:

"I mean to pound his flesh and smash his bones."

After the battle, the defeated was helped from the field. He spit forth clotted gore. His head rolled from side to side, until he fell unconscious.

Third, wrestling; fourth, foot-race; fifth, fencing; sixth, throwing the iron mass or bar; seventh, archery, and last, throwing the javelin.

All of these games were in honor of Patroclus. This is the same Patroclus who, according to Shakespeare, addressed Achilles in these words:

"In the battle-field I claim no special praise; 'Tis not for man in all things to excel--"

"Rouse yourself, and the weak wanton Cupid Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold, And, like a dew-drop from the lion's mane, Be shook to air."

These games were all born of the instinct of self-defence. The chariot was used in war. Man should know the use of his hands, to the end that he may repel assault. He should know the use of the sword, to the end that he may strike down his enemy. He should be skillful with the arrow, to the same end. If overpowered, he seeks safety in flight--he should therefore know how to run. So, too, he could preserve himself by the skillful throwing of the javelin, and in the close encounter a knowledge of wrestling might save his life.

Man has always been a fighting animal, and the art of self-defence is nearly as important now as ever--and will be, until man rises to that supreme height from which he will be able to see that no one can commit a crime against another without injuring himself.

The Greeks knew that the body bears a certain relation to the soul--that the better the body--other things being equal--the greater the mind. They also knew that the body could be developed, and that such development would give or add to the health, the courage, the endurance, the self-confidence, the independence and the morality of the human race. They knew, too, that health was the foundation, the corner-stone, of happiness.

They knew that human beings should know something about themselves, something of the capacities of body and mind, to the end that they might ascertain the relation between conduct and happiness, between temperance and health.

It is needless to say that the Greeks were the most intellectual of all races, and that they were in love with beauty, with proportion, with the splendor of the body and of mind; and so great was their admiration for the harmoniously developed, that Sophocles had the honor of walking naked at the head of a great procession.

The Greeks, through their love of physical and mental development, gave us the statues--the most precious of all inanimate things--of far more worth than all the diamonds and rubies and pearls that ever glittered in crowns and tiaras, on altars or thrones, or, flashing, rose and fell on woman's billowed breast. In these marbles we find the highest types of life, of superb endeavor and supreme repose. In looking at them we feel that blood flows, that hearts throb and souls aspire. These miracles of art are the richest legacies the ancient world has left our race.

The nations in love with life, have games. To them existence is exultation. They are fond of nature. They, seek the woods and streams. They love the winds and waves of the sea. They enjoy the poem of the day, the drama of the year.

Our Puritan fathers were oppressed with a sense of infinite responsibility. They were disconsolate and sad, and no more thought of sport, except the flogging of; Quakers, than shipwrecked wretches huddled on a raft would turn their attention to amateur theatricals.

For many centuries the body was regarded as a decaying; casket, in which had been placed the gem called the soul, and the nearer rotten the casket the more brilliant the jewel.

In those blessed days, the diseased were sainted and insanity born of fasting and self-denial and abuse of the body, was looked upon as evidence of inspiration. Cleanliness was not next to godliness--it was the opposite; and in those days, what was known as "the odor of sanctity" had a substantial foundation. Diseased bodies produced all kinds of mental maladies. There is a direct relation between sickness and superstition. Everybody knows that Calvinism was the child of indigestion.

Spooks and phantoms hover about the undeveloped and diseased, as vultures sail above the dead.

Our ancestors had the idea that they ought to be spiritual, and that good health was inconsistent with the highest forms of piety. This heresy crept into the minds even of secular writers, and the novelists described their heroines as weak and languishing, pale as lilies, and in the place of health's brave flag they put the hectic flush.

Weakness was interesting, and fainting captured the hearts of all. Nothing was so attractive as a society belle with a drug-store attachment.

People became ashamed of labor, and consequently, of the evidences of labor. They avoided "sun-burnt mirth"--were proud of pallor, and regarded small, white hands as proof that they had noble blood within their veins. It was a joy to be too weak to work, too languishing to labor.

The tide has turned. People are becoming sensible enough to desire health, to admire physical development, symmetry of form, and we now know that a race with little feet and hands has passed the climax and is traveling toward the eternal night.

When the central force is strong, men and women are full of life to the finger tips. When the fires burn low, they begin to shrivel at the extremities--the hands and feet grow small, and the mental flame wavers and wanes.

To be self-respecting we must be self-supporting.

Nobility is a question of character, not of birth.

Honor cannot be received as alms--it must be earned.

It is the brow that makes the wreath of glory green.

All exercise should be for the sake of development--that is to say, for the sake of health, and for the sake of the mind--all to the end that the person may become better, greater, more useful. The gymnast or the athelete should seek for health as the student should seek for truth; but when athletics degenerate into mere personal contests, they become dangerous, because the contestants lose sight of health, as in the excitement of debate the students prefer personal victory to the ascertainment of truth.

There is another thing to be avoided by all athletic clubs, and that is, anything that tends to brutalize, destroy or dull the finer feelings. Nothing is more disgusting, more disgraceful, than pugilism--nothing more demoralizing than an exhibition of strength united with ferocity, and where the very body developed by exercise is mutilated and disfigured.

Sports that can by no possibility give pleasure, except to the unfeeling, the hardened and the really brainless, should be avoided. No gentleman should countenance rabbit-coursing, fighting of dogs, the shooting of pigeons, simply as an exhibition of skill.

All these things are calculated to demoralize and brutalize not only the actors, but the lookers on. Such sports are savage, fit only to be participated in and enjoyed by the cannibals of Central Africa or the anthropoid apes.

Find what a man enjoys--what he laughs at--what he calls diversion--and you know what he is. Think of a man calling himself civilized, who is in raptures at a bull fight--who smiles when he sees the hounds pursue and catch and tear in pieces the timid hare, and who roars with laughter when he watches the pugilists pound each other's faces, closing each other's eyes, breaking jaws and smashing noses. Such men are beneath the animals they torture--on a level with the pugilists they applaud. Gentlemen should hold such sports in unspeakable contempt. No man finds pleasure in inflicting pain.

In every public school there should be a gymnasium.

It is useless to cram minds and deform bodies. Hands should be educated as well as heads. All should be taught the sports and games that require mind, muscle, nerve and judgment.

Even those who labor should take exercise, to the end that the whole body may be developed. Those who work at one employment become deformed. Proportion is lost. But where harmony is preserved by the proper exercise, even old age is beautiful.

To the well developed, to the strong, life seems rich, obstacles small, and success easy. They laugh at cold and storm. Whatever the season may be their hearts are filled with summer.

Millions go from the cradle to the coffin without knowing what it is to live. They simply succeed in postponing death. Without appetites, without passions, without struggle, they slowly rot in a waveless pool. They never know the glory of success, the rapture of the fight.

To become effeminate is to invite misery. In the most delicate bodies may be found the most degraded souls. It was the Duchess Josiane whose pampered flesh became so sensitive that she thought of hell as a place where people were compelled to sleep between coarse sheets.

We need the open air--we need the experience of heat and cold. We need not only the rewards and caresses, but the discipline of our mother Nature. Life is not all sunshine, neither is it all storm, but man should be enabled to enjoy the one and to withstand the other.

I believe in the religion of the body--of physical development--in devotional exercise--in the beatitudes of cheerfulness, good health, good food, good clothes, comradeship, generosity, and above all, in happiness. I believe in salvation here and now. Salvation from deformity and disease--from weakness and pain--from ennui and insanity. I believe in heaven here and now--the heaven of health and good digestion--of strength and long life--of usefulness and joy. I believe in the builders and defenders of homes.

The gentlemen whom we honor to-night have done a great work. To their energy we are indebted for the nearest perfect, for the grandest athletic clubhouse in the world. Let these clubs multiply. Let the example be followed, until our country is filled with physical and intellectual athletes--superb fathers, perfect mothers, and every child an heir to health and joy.

THE LIEDERKRANZ CLUB, SEIDL-STANTON BANQUET.

New York, April 2, 1891

TOAST: MUSIC, NOBLEST OF THE ARTS.

IT is probable that I was selected to speak about music, because, not knowing one note from another, I have no prejudice on the subject.

All I can say is, that I know what I like, and, to tell the truth, I like every kind, enjoy it all, from the hand organ to the orchestra.

Knowing nothing of the science of music, I am not always looking for defects, or listening for discords. As the young robin cheerfully swallows whatever comes, I hear with gladness all that is played.

Music has been, I suppose, a gradual growth, subject to the law of evolution; as nearly everything, with the possible exception of theology, has been and is under this law.

Music may be divided into three kinds: First, the music of simple time, without any particular emphasis--and this may be called the music of the heels; second, music in which time is varied, in which there is the eager haste and the delicious delay, that is, the fast and slow, in accordance with our feelings, with our emotions--and this may be called the music of the heart; third, the music that includes time and emphasis, the hastening and the delay, and something in addition, that produces not only states of feeling, but states of thought. This may be called the music of the head,--the music of the brain.

Music expresses feeling and thought, without language. It was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. Beneath the waves is the sea--above the clouds is the sky.

Before man found a name for any thought, or thing, he had hopes and fears and passions, and these were rudely expressed in tones.

Of one thing, however, I am certain, and that is, that Music was born of Love. Had there never been any human affection, there never could have been uttered a strain of music. Possibly some mother, looking in the eyes of her babe, gave the first melody to the enraptured air.

Language is not subtle enough, tender enough, to express all that we feel; and when language fails, the highest and deepest longings are translated into music. Music is the sunshine--the climate--of the soul, and it floods the heart with a perfect June.

I am also satisfied that the greatest music is the most marvelous mingling of Love and Death. Love is the greatest of all passions, and Death is its shadow. Death gets all its terror from Love, and Love gets its intensity, its radiance, its glory and its rapture, from the darkness of Death. Love is a flower that grows on the edge of the grave.

The old music, for the most part, expresses emotion, or feeling-, through time and emphasis, and what is known as melody. Most of the old operas consist of a few melodies connected by unmeaning recitative. There should be no unmeaning music. It is as though a writer should suddenly leave his subject and write a paragraph consisting of nothing but a repetition of one word like "the," "the," "the," or "if," "if." "if," varying the repetition of these words, but without meaning,--and then resume the subject of his article.

I am not saying that great music was not produced before Wagner, but I am simply endeavoring to show-the steps that have been taken. It was necessary that all the music should have been written, in order that the greatest might be produced. The same is true of the drama, Thousands and thousands prepared the way for the supreme dramatist, as millions prepared the way for the supreme composer.

When I read Shakespeare, I am astonished that he has expressed so much with common words, to which he gives new meaning; and so when I hear Wagner, I exclaim: Is it possible that all this is done with common air?

In Wagner's music there is a touch of chaos that suggests the infinite. The melodies seem strange and changing forms, like summer clouds, and weird harmonies come like sounds from the sea brought by fitful winds, and others moan like waves on desolate shores, and mingled with these, are shouts of joy, with sighs and sobs and ripples of laughter, and the wondrous voices of eternal love.

Wagner is the Shakespeare of Music.

The funeral march for Siegfried is the funeral music for all the dead; Should all the gods die, this music would be perfectly appropriate. It is elemental, universal, eternal.

The love-music in Tristan and Isolde is, like Romeo and Juliet, an expression of the human heart for all time. So the love-duet in The Flying Dutchman has in it the consecration, the infinite self-denial, of love. The whole heart is given; every note has wings, and rises and poises like an eagle in the heaven of sound.

When I listen to the music of Wagner, I see pictures, forms, glimpses of the perfect, the swell of a hip, the wave of a breast, the glance of an eye. I am in the midst of great galleries. Before me are passing, the endless panoramas. I see vast landscapes with valleys of verdure and vine, with soaring crags, snow-crowned. I am on the wide seas, where countless billows burst into the white caps of joy. I am in the depths of caverns roofed with mighty crags, while through some rent I see the eternal stars. In a moment the music, becomes a river of melody, flowing through some wondrous land; suddenly it falls in strange chasms, and the mighty cataract is changed to seven-hued foam. .

Great music is always sad, because it tells us of the perfect; and such is the difference between what we are and that which music suggests, that even in the vase of joy we find some tears.

The music of Wagner has color, and when I hear the violins, the morning seems to slowly come. A horn puts a star above the horizon. The night, in the purple hum of the bass, wanders away like some enormous bee across wide fields of dead clover. The light grows whiter as the violins increase. Colors come from other instruments, and then the full orchestra floods the world with day.

Wagner seems not only to have given us new tones, new combinations, but the moment the orchestra begins to play his music, all the instruments are transfigured. They seem to utter the sounds that they have been longing to utter. The horns run riot; the drums and cymbals join in the general joy; the old bass viols are alive with passion; the 'cellos throb with love; the violins are seized with a divine fury, and the notes rush out as eager for the air as pardoned prisoners for the roads and fields.

The music of Wagner is filled with landscapes. There are some strains, like midnight, thick with constellations, and there are harmonies like islands in the far seas, and others like palms on the desert's edge. His music satisfies the heart and brain. It is not only for memory; not only for the present, but for prophecy.

Wagner was a sculptor, a painter, in sound. When he died, the greatest fountain of melody that ever enchanted the world, ceased. His music will instruct and refine forever.

All that I know about the operas of Wagner I have learned from Anton Seidl. I believe that he is the noblest, tenderest and the most artistic interpreter of the great composer that has ever lived.

THE FRANK B. CARPENTER DINNER.

New York, December 1, 1891

* There was a notable gathering of leading artists, authors, scientists, journalists, lawyer, clergymen and other professional men at Sherry's last evening. The occasion was a dinner tendered to Mr. F. B. Carpenter, the famous portrait and portrait group artist, by his immediate friends to celebrate the completion of his new historical painting, entitled "International Arbitration," which is to be sent to Queen Victoria next week as the gift of a wealthy American lady. No such tribute has ever been paid before to an artist of-this country. Let us hope that the extraordinary attention thus paid to Mr. Carpenter will give our "English cousins" some idea of how he is prized and his work indorsed at home. The dinner to Mr. Carpenter was a great success-- most enjoyable in every way. The table was laid in the form ol a horse shoe with a train of smilax, and sweet flowers extending the entire length of the table, amid pots of chrysanthemums and roses. Ex-Minister Andrew D White presided in the absence of John Russell

Young..........Mr. White said: "During the entire course of these proceedings we have been endeavoring to find a representative of the great Fourth Estate who would present its claims in relation to arbitration on this occasion. There are present men whose names are household words in connection with the press throughout this land. There is certainly one distinguished as orator: there is another distinguished as a scholar. But they prefer to be silent. We will therefore consider that the toast of 'The Press in Connection with War and Peace' has been duly honored although it has not been responded to, and now there is one subject which I think you will consider as coming strangely at this late hour. It is a renewal of the subject with which we began, and I am to ask to speak to it a man who is admired and feared throughout the country. At one moment he smashes the most cherished convictions of the country, and at another he raises our highest aspirations for the future of humanity.

"It happened several years ago that I was crossing the Atlantic, and when I had sufficiently recovered from seasickness to sit out on the deck I came across Colonel Ingersoll, and of all subjects of discussion you can imagine we fell upon the subject of art, and we went at it hot and heavy. So I said to him to-night that I had a rod in pickle for him and that he was not to know anything about it until it was displayed.

"I now call upon him to talk to us about art, and if he talks now as he talked on the deck of the steamer I do not know whether it would clear the room, but it would make a sensation in this State and country. I have great pleasure in announcing Colonel Ingersoll, to speak on the subject of art--or on any other subject, for no matter upon what he speaks his words are always welcome."

New York Press, December 2, 1891.

TOAST: ART.