IX
THE JOYOUS MISSION OF MECHANICAL MUSIC
wonder if any other invention has ever, in such a brief time, made so many joyful hearts as the invention of mechanical music. It has brought light, peace, gladness, and the gift of self-expression to every third or fourth flat, villa, and lonely farmhouse in the land. Its voice has literally gone out through all the earth, and with a swiftness more like that of light than of sound.
Only yesterday we were marveling at the discovery of the larger magazine audience. Until then we had never dreamed of addressing millions of fellow creatures at one time, as the popular magazine now does. Imagine the astonished delight of Plato or Cervantes, Poe or Dickens, if they had been given in one week an audience equivalent in number to five thousand readers a year for ten centuries! Dickens would have called it, I think, "immortality-while-you-wait." Yet this sort of immortality was recently placed at the immediate disposal of the ordinary writer.
The miracle was unique in history. But it did not long remain so. Not content with raining this wonder upon us, history at once poured down a greater. One morning we awoke to find a new and still vaster medium of expression, a medium whose globe-girdling voice was to that of the five-million reader magazine as the roar of Niagara to the roar of a Philadelphia trolley-car. To-day, from wherever civilized man has obtained even a temporary foothold, there arise without ceasing the accents of mechanical music, which talk persuasively to all in a language so universal that even the beasts understand it and cock applauding ears at the sound of the master voice. So that, while the magazine writers now address the million, the composers and singers and players make their bows to the billion.
Their omnipresence is astonishing. They are the last to bid you farewell when you leave civilization. They are the first to greet you on your return. When I canoed across the wild Allagash country, I was sped from Moosehead Lake by Caruso, received with open arms at the halfway house by the great-hearted Plancon, and welcomed to Fort Kent by Sousa and his merry men. With Schumann-Heinck, Melba, and Tetrazzini I once camped in the heart of the Sierras. When I persisted to the uttermost secret corner of the Dolomites, I found myself anticipated by Kreisler and his fiddle. They tell me that the portly Victor Herbert has even penetrated with his daring orchestra through darkest Africa and gone on to arrange a special benefit, in his home town, for the dalai-lama of Tibet.
One of the most promising things about mechanical music is this: No matter what kind of music or quality of performance it offers you, you presently long for something a little better—unless your development has been arrested. It makes small difference in this respect which one of the three main varieties of instrument you happen to own. It may be the phonograph. It may be the kind of automatic piano which accurately reproduces the performances of the master pianists. It may be the piano-player which indulgently supplies you with technic ready-made, and allows you to throw your own soul into the music, whether you have ever taken lessons or not. Or it may be a combination of the last two. The influence of these machines is progressive. It stands for evolution rather than for devolution or revolution.