He had been rude, but he couldn’t help it; besides, it looked as if they would reach Baireuth too late for the opening performance, and his was the laughter of despair.
The youthful pilgrim journeying to Baireuth was born in New York. He had studied music like most young people in his country, and had begun with that camel, that musical beast of all burdens, the piano. This he practised most assiduously at intervals, because he really loved music; but college, lawn-tennis, golfing, dancing, and motor-boating had claims not easily put aside. Naturally, the piano suffered until Paul left college; then for want of something better to do he took lessons from Joseffy and edified that master by his spurts of industry. His club began to encroach on his attention, and again the piano was forgotten. Paul, whose parents were rich, was not a society butterfly, but his training, instincts, and associations forced him to regard a good dinner, a good tailor, and a racing motor-car as necessary to his existence. From his mother he inherited his love of music, and his father, dead many years, had bequeathed him a library; better still, a taste for reading.
An average cultivated American, intensely self-conscious, too self-conscious to show himself at his best, ashamed of his finer emotions, like most of his countrymen, and a trifle spoiled and shallow.
One day Edgar Saltus told Paul he should read Schopenhauer, and he at once ordered the two volumes of The World as Will and Representation. It was not difficult reading, because he had been in Professor Bowne’s class at college and enjoyed the cracking of metaphysical nuts. He began to get side glimpses of Wagner’s philosophy, but despite the wit of the German Diogenes his pessimism repelled him. He could not agree with Saltus’s ingenious defense of pessimism in his two early books, and he looked about for diversion elsewhere. Walter Pater’s silken chords, velvety verbal music, had seduced Paul from the astringencies of Herbert Spencer, and Chopin made moonlight for his soul on morbid nights.
Yet Paul, with his selfish, well-bred, easy life, had encountered no soul-racking convulsions; he had never been in love, therefore he played the nocturnes of Chopin in a very unconvincing manner.
He always declared that Poe was bilious, and this remark gained for him the reputation of wit and scholar among his club associates.
The Calumel Club is not given to velléités of speech....
II
Then Paul Godard fell into the clutches of Richard Wagner and swallowed much of him.
Chopin seemed tiny, exotic, and feminine compared to the sirocco blasts of the Baireuth master. Paul was not too critical, and, like most Americans, he measured music by its immediate emotional result. The greater the assault upon the senses, the greater the music. The logic was inescapable.