We are recited to, sung to, played to, and there being nothing so "cussed" as human nature, no sooner are we played to and recited to than our "cussedness" will out, and we are seized with a wild longing to talk, and talk we do at the top of our voices. Universal resentment is expressed towards the blameless arts that temporarily check our interchange of what it would be flattery to call ideas, but, in my own experience, when some stray man and I have stood together speechless, no sooner did the piano break into our appalling silence than ideas seemed to inundate us. The dumb man spoke as if by magic, and I, who hitherto had nothing to say, couldn't talk fast enough.
The divine arts are too good to be wasted in a twentieth century drawing-room! Such conversation as there is, is amply accompanied by the pianola and the gramophone. These two awful inventions are to music what the chromo is to painting. They make music as vulgar as machine-made lace.
My first experience of the pianola was at the Universal Provider's. It was Christmas time, and I was so tired and harassed that I stood quite still in the surging crowd, oblivious of the sharp elbows of my shopping sisters, oblivious of dust and microbes, only conscious that I was dizzy with fatigue. Suddenly through the crowd I heard the familiar strains of the great romantic polonaise of Chopin—the one introduced by the exquisite Andante Spianato. It is a mediæval romance without words, of chivalry, tournaments, gallant cavaliers, and beautiful women; all this I heard in the piano department of the Universal Provider.
I couldn't understand it! What great artist could so far forget himself as to play this divine work for a passing, heedless, irritable crowd. I pushed my way past my sisters, and possibly used my elbows. As I came nearer I grew confused by something exasperatingly perfect in the sound. The humanity of a single false note was wanting. I reached the crowd about the piano—well, everybody has seen a pianola! An imitation artist (he had long fair hair) steered the music and pumped in the expression at the proper place, while the indefatigable instrument ejected miles of punctured paper.
Never did anything so get on my nerves! I nearly wept. It is, perhaps, needless to say that the pianola and other instruments of its kind are of American origin, and, like all American inventions, they are labour-saving. You can be a Paderewski while you wait, but, thank Heaven! no ingenious American has yet invented a mechanical Joachim!
The first modest invention, the grandparent of the pianola, was exhibited in Boston (America) years and years ago, and was a modest little box, with only a small appetite for punctured paper. One of the judges of the musical instruments at the exhibition showed me this curious music-box, to which, because of its ingenuity, they had decided to give a prize. Now the instrument has waxed greater and greater, and no one is safe from it, no, not if you go to the farthest desert or highest mountain. It graces afternoon teas, while the guests refresh themselves in stunned silence, or shriek at the top of their voices in vain rivalry, until they melt into the street, where the turmoil of cabs, carts, vans, and motors is soothing and peaceful by comparison.
For a stranger to penetrate into typical English social circles is often a blighting experience. If the hostess is a woman of the world, she comes to your assistance; but if she is the woman of an island, you find yourself stranded, unintroduced, and surrounded by more or less handsome and statuesque creatures, who would possibly be delighted to talk to you if you were introduced—or possibly not.
Oh, the debatable question of introduction! One sometimes thinks that in England people go into society just to avoid each other; at least so it would appear from the ardent way in which they decline to be introduced. Conventional smart English society does not introduce, and that sets the fashion.
Society knows too many people, and refuses to know more; and its young men, having at their command only two feet apiece, also refuse to be introduced, for they cannot extend the field of their activities. The young man's toil consists largely in duty dances, for the only way he can pay a worried mother for a dinner-party is by dancing with her daughter, who still hangs fire. So his path is not always strewn with roses. Still his is easier than the "gal's," for he can decline to be introduced to her, and he does this often with the little caprices and insolence of a society belle.
"Do let me introduce you to my cousin," said a generous young soul to her partner, "she is such a nice 'gal.'"