From the Easy Chair, Volume 1

by George William Curtis

When she sits at the piano and touches the keys, they respond, as one whom she fascinated said, with such smooth sweetness that you think there is conscious pleasure to them in that pressure. It is apparently as gentle, he insisted, as that of the breeze upon the grass which lightly sways beneath it. The impression upon this sensitive youth was a test of the character of her playing. If he had said she sings with her fingers he would have said what he doubtless thought, and what is true. She plays German songs--some of the familiar songs in the collections, or something of Lassen's or Weit's, or Abt's, or one of a thousand other songs, and the playing is like exquisite singing. It fills the mind with pictures, with persons, with scenes, and with that unspeakable content which only such music can give to the lovers of music. "What on earth is it all about?" said the Senator at the Symphony Concert, "and why do people come here?" The Hottentot would have asked the same question if he had heard the Senator upon the stump.

If the fairy godmother who presides over the cradle should give the newcomer the choice of gifts, what gift more precious could the young stranger ask than the power of giving a pleasure so pure as that which Cecilia's playing imparts? It is one of her praises that if the choice had been given to her she would instantly have selected the very power which the good fairy bestowed. For in giving the pleasure she does only what she delights to do and would have chosen to do. One philosopher, speaking to the Easy Chair of another, whose serenity was as undisturbed by events as the firmament by clouds, said of himself that he subdued more devils before breakfast every day than his serene brother had encountered in his whole life. Yet the serene brother's lofty repose was not less admirable because it was a quality of temperament, and not a triumph of the will; and it is not less the merit of Cecilia that the happiness she diffuses is as involuntary as the fragrance of the sweetbrier.

What is done without effort seems not to have been taught, and it is not easy to fancy Cecilia drudging at exercises and laboring at scales. Canaries, indeed, are trained to sing, and even young birds to fly. Yet the training is but showing them how to give themselves free play. To express entire facility we say that an act is done as naturally as a bird sings. Not less naturally does Cecilia play. You listen, and the song which you knew seems to sing itself, but enveloped with a richness and fulness of flowing accompaniment which is like the harping of aerial choirs. Then with others she plays the great music, concerted Bach or Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, or Wagner, Weber or Mendelssohn; now an old gavotte, now a quaint fantasia, and why not a toccata of Galuppi Baldassero? It is more than a hint or a reminiscence, although it is not an orchestra. But when those fingers kindred with Cecilia's sweep the keys together, the listener wonders whether the hearer of the full orchestra has caught from it the subtle and exquisite significance of the strain which has poured from those enchanted pianos.

The piano is called an inadequate instrument. Perhaps it is, until you hear Cecilia play. Then by some secret sympathy you find yourself murmuring, "Not so sweetly sang Plumer as thou sangest, mild, childlike, pastoral M----; a flute's breathing less divinely whispering than thy Arcadian melodies when, in tones worthy of Arden, thou didst chant that song sung by Amiens to the banished Duke, which proclaims the winter wind more lenient than for a man to be ungrateful!"

[THE MANNERLESS SEX.]

To be told that the lily is not the flower of vestals, but of Venus, could not be more surprising than to be assured that the mannerless sex is not that of the troubadour Rudel, but of the Lady of Tripoli, to whom he sang. Such a suggestion is, of course, but a merry fancy. Could any critic, however inclined to misogyny, seriously allege ill-manners against the sex of Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother? Yet this is precisely what has been recently done.

One censor enumerates and catalogues and classifies the sins against good manners of which the sex is guilty. He presents a philosophical analysis of the recondite forms of feminine discourtesy. It is the ancient sage again pitilessly exposing the Lamia. It is Circe out-Circed. He details the degrees of offence--in young women, in women who are no longer classed as girls, in nearly all women, in women with the fewest social duties. Then the boundless Sahara of ill-manners opening before him, and with a certain zest of unsparing scrutiny, he treats of the behavior of women in the horse-cars, at the railway station buying tickets, at the post-office, where the rule is imperative, first come first served, but where this chief of sinners presses for a reversal of the beneficent rule of equality in her favor.

Still more flagrant aspects of misconduct rise upon the censor's view of the sex. The shameful or shocking treatment by woman of those whom she holds to be her inferiors cries to Heaven. Her heartless detention of railway porters staggering under their burdens, her browbeating of "tradespeople," cause this observer of fine susceptibilities and an acute sense of the becoming to lament the desuetude of the ducking-stool. The more general outrage, however, apparently common to the sex from Helen of Troy to Florence Nightingale, is, according to our censor, the spite of women towards each other, which mounts into an ecstasy of rudeness when "woman goes a-shopping."

But our Cato the elder does not permit man truculently to exalt himself by contrast with discourteous woman. He expressly disclaims the declaration of the implication that man is mannerly, while woman is not. In many men he remarks indifference to rudimentary courtesies, and in many women a gentle regard for others which deserves even eulogy. The sum of the whole matter, nevertheless, is that the average woman is more neglectful of common courtesy than the average man.

"And no wonder," exclaims Cato the younger, "for the foolish fondness of man teaches her discourtesy." If man, instead of giving her his seat in the railway car, and slavishly removing his hat in the elevator, and acquiescing in her tyrannical hat at the theatre, insisted upon his legal rights in a bargain, and required the railroad company to furnish without evasion the commodity of seats for which it has been paid, or if he brought the manager to task for allowing one of his customers to steal what he has sold to another--namely, a view of the play--the world would tremble on the edge of the millennium of good manners.