——“You sing it with such taste too. Do you know it in Italian?”
——“Sir! But I have just sung it in Italian.”
——“Really? I beg your pardon, I was so much under the influence of the melody that I was not listening to the words.”
“I am not in luck to-night decidedly,” I said to myself as I returned to my seat, feeling rather silly. “But, after all, I brought it on myself.”
A quarter of an hour later, my Briton seated himself at the piano, and played a nocturne rejoicing in the title of “Evening Breeze,” or something equally original. I was told in confidence that it was a piece of his own composition. He played it correctly enough to satisfy a mathematician, without putting more expression into it than a musical-box would have done. For that matter, if you would please a drawing-room audience here, you must sing or play like a machine; no refractory muscle must compromise the British dignity.
The Englishman who shows his feelings loses his self-control, and becomes an object for the contemptuous pity of his compatriots. It is bad form.
The sympathetic voice is unknown: people sing more or less loudly, more or less out of tune. When the hostess comes and tells you: “This gentleman is going to sing; he has a magnificent voice,” that means that he has the voice of a Stentor.
If I had to describe the nearest approach to the effect produced on one by Mrs. John Bull’s soirées musicales, I should say, intense pains which I can only compare to toothache in the intestines. Imagine yourself to be having a molar tooth extracted from the depths of your stomach.
The musical evenings, passe encore: people make a good deal of noise, and you have the satisfaction of feeling that you are alive. Besides, when the row is over, you sup; and, as I have told you, Mrs. John Bull’s suppers are very good.
But there is something worse than the musical party; it is the conversazione, so called, because at this entertainment, you walk about a great deal and converse very little.