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!”