What Is Man?

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> What Is Man?


"And the rest girls. It's just as I expected. But that's all right, and
it's better so, anyway. What are the boys doing--learning a trade?"

"Well, no--I thought--"

"It's a big mistake. It's the biggest mistake you ever made. You see
that in your own case. A man ought always to have a trade to fall back
on. Now, I was harness-maker at first. Did that prevent me from
becoming one of the biggest brewers in America? Oh no. I always had the
harness trick to fall back on in rough weather. Now, if you had learned
how to make harness--However, it's too late now; too late. But it's no
good plan to cry over spilt milk. But as to the boys, you see--what's to
become of them if anything happens to you?"

"It has been my idea to let the eldest one succeed me--"

"Oh, come! Suppose the firm don't want him?"

"I hadn't thought of that, but--"

"Now, look here; you want to get right down to business and stop
dreaming. You are capable of immense things--man. You can make a
perfect success in life. All you want is somebody to steady you and
boost you along on the right road. Do you own anything in the business?"

"No--not exactly; but if I continue to give satisfaction, I suppose I can
keep my--"

"Keep your place--yes. Well, don't you depend on anything of the kind.
They'll bounce you the minute you get a little old and worked out;
they'll do it sure. Can't you manage somehow to get into the firm?
That's the great thing, you know."

"I think it is doubtful; very doubtful."

"Um--that's bad--yes, and unfair, too. Do you suppose that if I should
go there and have a talk with your people--Look here--do you think you
could run a brewery?"

"I have never tried, but I think I could do it after a little familiarity
with the business."

The German was silent for some time. He did a good deal of thinking, and
the king waited curiously to see what the result was going to be.
Finally the German said:

"My mind's made up. You leave that crowd--you'll never amount to
anything there. In these old countries they never give a fellow a show.
Yes, you come over to America--come to my place in Rochester; bring the
family along. You shall have a show in the business and the foremanship,
besides. George--you said your name was George?--I'll make a man of you.
I give you my word. You've never had a chance here, but that's all going
to change. By gracious! I'll give you a lift that'll make your hair
curl!"





AT THE SHRINE OF ST. WAGNER

Bayreuth, Aug. 2d, 1891

It was at Nuremberg that we struck the inundation of music-mad strangers
that was rolling down upon Bayreuth. It had been long since we had seen
such multitudes of excited and struggling people. It took a good
half-hour to pack them and pair them into the train--and it was the
longest train we have yet seen in Europe. Nuremberg had been witnessing
this sort of experience a couple of times a day for about two weeks. It
gives one an impressive sense of the magnitude of this biennial
pilgrimage. For a pilgrimage is what it is. The devotees come from the
very ends of the earth to worship their prophet in his own Kaaba in his
own Mecca.

If you are living in New York or San Francisco or Chicago or anywhere
else in America, and you conclude, by the middle of May, that you would
like to attend the Bayreuth opera two months and a half later, you must
use the cable and get about it immediately or you will get no seats, and
you must cable for lodgings, too. Then if you are lucky you will get
seats in the last row and lodgings in the fringe of the town. If you
stop to write you will get nothing. There were plenty of people in
Nuremberg when we passed through who had come on pilgrimage without first
securing seats and lodgings. They had found neither in Bayreuth; they
had walked Bayreuth streets a while in sorrow, then had gone to Nuremberg
and found neither beds nor standing room, and had walked those quaint
streets all night, waiting for the hotels to open and empty their guests
into trains, and so make room for these, their defeated brethren and
sisters in the faith. They had endured from thirty to forty hours'
railroading on the continent of Europe--with all which that implies of
worry, fatigue, and financial impoverishment--and all they had got and
all they were to get for it was handiness and accuracy in kicking
themselves, acquired by practice in the back streets of the two towns
when other people were in bed; for back they must go over that
unspeakable journey with their pious mission unfulfilled. These
humiliated outcasts had the frowsy and unbrushed and apologetic look of
wet cats, and their eyes were glazed with drowsiness, their bodies were
adroop from crown to sole, and all kind-hearted people refrained from
asking them if they had been to Bayreuth and failed to connect, as
knowing they would lie.

We reached here (Bayreuth) about mid-afternoon of a rainy Saturday. We
were of the wise, and had secured lodgings and opera seats months in
advance.

I am not a musical critic, and did not come here to write essays about
the operas and deliver judgment upon their merits. The little children of
Bayreuth could do that with a finer sympathy and a broader intelligence
than I. I only care to bring four or five pilgrims to the operas,
pilgrims able to appreciate them and enjoy them. What I write about the
performance to put in my odd time would be offered to the public as
merely a cat's view of a king, and not of didactic value.

Next day, which was Sunday, we left for the opera-house--that is to say,
the Wagner temple--a little after the middle of the afternoon. The great
building stands all by itself, grand and lonely, on a high ground outside
the town. We were warned that if we arrived after four o'clock we should
be obliged to pay two dollars and a half extra by way of fine. We saved
that; and it may be remarked here that this is the only opportunity that
Europe offers of saving money. There was a big crowd in the grounds
about the building, and the ladies' dresses took the sun with fine
effect. I do not mean to intimate that the ladies were in full dress,
for that was not so. The dresses were pretty, but neither sex was in
evening dress.

The interior of the building is simple--severely so; but there is no
occasion for color and decoration, since the people sit in the dark. The
auditorium has the shape of a keystone, with the stage at the narrow end.
There is an aisle on each side, but no aisle in the body of the house.
Each row of seats extends in an unbroken curve from one side of the house
to the other. There are seven entrance doors on each side of the theater
and four at the butt, eighteen doors to admit and emit 1,650 persons.
The number of the particular door by which you are to enter the house or
leave it is printed on your ticket, and you can use no door but that one.
Thus, crowding and confusion are impossible. Not so many as a hundred
people use any one door. This is better than having the usual (and
useless) elaborate fireproof arrangements. It is the model theater of
the world. It can be emptied while the second hand of a watch makes its
circuit. It would be entirely safe, even if it were built of lucifer
matches.

If your seat is near the center of a row and you enter late you must work
your way along a rank of about twenty-five ladies and gentlemen to get to
it. Yet this causes no trouble, for everybody stands up until all the
seats are full, and the filling is accomplished in a very few minutes.
Then all sit down, and you have a solid mass of fifteen hundred heads,
making a steep cellar-door slant from the rear of the house down to the
stage.

All the lights were turned low, so low that the congregation sat in a
deep and solemn gloom. The funereal rustling of dresses and the low buzz
of conversation began to die swiftly down, and presently not the ghost of
a sound was left. This profound and increasingly impressive stillness
endured for some time--the best preparation for music, spectacle, or
speech conceivable. I should think our show people would have invented
or imported that simple and impressive device for securing and
solidifying the attention of an audience long ago; instead of which there
continue to this day to open a performance against a deadly competition
in the form of noise, confusion, and a scattered interest.

Finally, out of darkness and distance and mystery soft rich notes rose
upon the stillness, and from his grave the dead magician began to weave
his spells about his disciples and steep their souls in his enchantments.
There was something strangely impressive in the fancy which kept
intruding itself that the composer was conscious in his grave of what was
going on here, and that these divine souls were the clothing of thoughts
which were at this moment passing through his brain, and not recognized
and familiar ones which had issued from it at some former time.

The entire overture, long as it was, was played to a dark house with the
curtain down. It was exquisite; it was delicious. But straightway
thereafter, or course, came the singing, and it does seem to me that
nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to
the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts. I wish I could see a
Wagner opera done in pantomime once. Then one would have the lovely
orchestration unvexed to listen to and bathe his spirit in, and the
bewildering beautiful scenery to intoxicate his eyes with, and the dumb
acting couldn't mar these pleasures, because there isn't often anything
in the Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting;
as a rule all you would see would be a couple of silent people, one of
them standing still, the other catching flies. Of course I do not really
mean that he would be catching flies; I only mean that the usual operatic
gestures which consist in reaching first one hand out into the air and
then the other might suggest the sport I speak of if the operator
attended strictly to business and uttered no sound.

This present opera was "Parsifal." Madame Wagner does not permit its
representation anywhere but in Bayreuth. The first act of the three
occupied two hours, and I enjoyed that in spite of the singing.

I trust that I know as well as anybody that singing is one of the most
entrancing and bewitching and moving and eloquent of all the vehicles
invented by man for the conveying of feeling; but it seems to me that the
chief virtue in song is melody, air, tune, rhythm, or what you please to
call it, and that when this feature is absent what remains is a picture
with the color left out. I was not able to detect in the vocal parts of
"Parsifal" anything that might with confidence be called rhythm or tune
or melody; one person performed at a time--and a long time, too--often
in a noble, and always in a high-toned, voice; but he only pulled out
long notes, then some short ones, then another long one, then a sharp,
quick, peremptory bark or two--and so on and so on; and when he was done
you saw that the information which he had conveyed had not compensated
for the disturbance. Not always, but pretty often. If two of them would
but put in a duet occasionally and blend the voices; but no, they don't
do that. The great master, who knew so well how to make a hundred
instruments rejoice in unison and pour out their souls in mingled and
melodious tides of delicious sound, deals only in barren solos when he
puts in the vocal parts. It may be that he was deep, and only added the
singing to his operas for the sake of the contrast it would make with the
music. Singing! It does seem the wrong name to apply to it. Strictly
described, it is a practicing of difficult and unpleasant intervals,
mainly. An ignorant person gets tired of listening to gymnastic
intervals in the long run, no matter how pleasant they may be. In
"Parsifal" there is a hermit named Gurnemanz who stands on the stage in
one spot and practices by the hour, while first one and then another
character of the cast endures what he can of it and then retires to die.

During the evening there was an intermission of three-quarters of an hour
after the first act and one an hour long after the second. In both
instances the theater was totally emptied. People who had previously
engaged tables in the one sole eating-house were able to put in their
time very satisfactorily; the other thousand went hungry. The opera was
concluded at ten in the evening or a little later. When we reached home
we had been gone more than seven hours. Seven hours at five dollars a
ticket is almost too much for the money.

While browsing about the front yard among the crowd between the acts I
encountered twelve or fifteen friends from different parts of America,
and those of them who were most familiar with Wagner said that "Parsifal"
seldom pleased at first, but that after one had heard it several times it
was almost sure to become a favorite. It seemed impossible, but it was
true, for the statement came from people whose word was not to be
doubted.

And I gathered some further information. On the ground I found part of a
German musical magazine, and in it a letter written by Uhlic thirty-three
years ago, in which he defends the scorned and abused Wagner against
people like me, who found fault with the comprehensive absence of what
our kind regards as singing. Uhlic says Wagner despised "JENE PLAPPERUDE
MUSIC," and therefore "runs, trills, and SCHNORKEL are discarded by him."
I don't know what a SCHNORKEL is, but now that I know it has been left
out of these operas I never have missed so much in my life. And Uhlic
further says that Wagner's song is true: that it is "simply emphasized
intoned speech." That certainly describes it--in "Parsifal" and some of
the operas; and if I understand Uhlic's elaborate German he apologizes
for the beautiful airs in "Tannh:auser." Very well; now that Wagner and
I understand each other, perhaps we shall get along better, and I shall
stop calling Waggner, on the American plan, and thereafter call him
Waggner as per German custom, for I feel entirely friendly now. The
minute we get reconciled to a person, how willing we are to throw aside
little needless puctilios and pronounce his name right!

Of course I came home wondering why people should come from all corners
of America to hear these operas, when we have lately had a season or two
of them in New York with these same singers in the several parts, and
possibly this same orchestra. I resolved to think that out at all
hazards.

TUESDAY.--Yesterday they played the only operatic favorite I have ever
had--an opera which has always driven me mad with ignorant delight
whenever I have heard it--"Tannh:auser." I heard it first when I was a
youth; I heard it last in the last German season in New York. I was busy
yesterday and I did not intend to go, knowing I should have another
"Tannh:auser" opportunity in a few days; but after five o'clock I found
myself free and walked out to the opera-house and arrived about the
beginning of the second act. My opera ticket admitted me to the grounds
in front, past the policeman and the chain, and I thought I would take a
rest on a bench for an hour and two and wait for the third act.

In a moment or so the first bugles blew, and the multitude began to
crumble apart and melt into the theater. I will explain that this
bugle-call is one of the pretty features here. You see, the theater is
empty, and hundreds of the audience are a good way off in the
feeding-house; the first bugle-call is blown about a quarter of an hour
before time for the curtain to rise. This company of buglers, in uniform,
march out with military step and send out over the landscape a few bars
of the theme of the approaching act, piercing the distances with the
gracious notes; then they march to the other entrance and repeat.
Presently they do this over again. Yesterday only about two hundred
people were still left in front of the house when the second call was
blown; in another half-minute they would have been in the house, but then
a thing happened which delayed them--the only solitary thing in this
world which could be relied on with certainty to accomplish it, I
suppose--an imperial princess appeared in the balcony above them. They
stopped dead in their tracks and began to gaze in a stupor of gratitude
and satisfaction. The lady presently saw that she must disappear or the
doors would be closed upon these worshipers, so she returned to her box.
This daughter-in-law of an emperor was pretty; she had a kind face; she
was without airs; she is known to be full of common human sympathies.
There are many kinds of princesses, but this kind is the most harmful of
all, for wherever they go they reconcile people to monarchy and set back
the clock of progress. The valuable princes, the desirable princes, are
the czars and their sort. By their mere dumb presence in the world they
cover with derision every argument that can be invented in favor of
royalty by the most ingenious casuist. In his time the husband of this
princess was valuable. He led a degraded life, he ended it with his own
hand in circumstances and surroundings of a hideous sort, and was buried
like a god.

In the opera-house there is a long loft back of the audience, a kind of
open gallery, in which princes are displayed. It is sacred to them; it is
the holy of holies. As soon as the filling of the house is about
complete the standing multitude turn and fix their eyes upon the princely
layout and gaze mutely and longingly and adoringly and regretfully like
sinners looking into heaven. They become rapt, unconscious, steeped in
worship. There is no spectacle anywhere that is more pathetic than this.
It is worth crossing many oceans to see. It is somehow not the same gaze
that people rivet upon a Victor Hugo, or Niagara, or the bones of the
mastodon, or the guillotine of the Revolution, or the great pyramid, or
distant Vesuvius smoking in the sky, or any man long celebrated to you by
his genius and achievements, or thing long celebrated to you by the
praises of books and pictures--no, that gaze is only the gaze of intense
curiosity, interest, wonder, engaged in drinking delicious deep draughts
that taste good all the way down and appease and satisfy the thirst of a
lifetime. Satisfy it--that is the word. Hugo and the mastodon will
still have a degree of intense interest thereafter when encountered, but
never anything approaching the ecstasy of that first view. The interest
of a prince is different. It may be envy, it may be worship, doubtless
it is a mixture of both--and it does not satisfy its thirst with one
view, or even noticeably diminish it. Perhaps the essence of the thing
is the value which men attach to a valuable something which has come by
luck and not been earned. A dollar picked up in the road is more
satisfaction to you than the ninety-and-nine which you had to work for,
and money won at faro or in stocks snuggles into your heart in the same
way. A prince picks up grandeur, power, and a permanent holiday and
gratis support by a pure accident, the accident of birth, and he stands
always before the grieved eye of poverty and obscurity a monumental
representative of luck. And then--supremest value of all-his is the only
high fortune on the earth which is secure. The commercial millionaire
may become a beggar; the illustrious statesman can make a vital mistake
and be dropped and forgotten; the illustrious general can lose a decisive
battle and with it the consideration of men; but once a prince always a
prince--that is to say, an imitation god, and neither hard fortune nor an
infamous character nor an addled brain nor the speech of an ass can
undeify him. By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the
most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved
or undeserved. It follows without doubt or question, then, that the most
desirable position possible is that of a prince. And I think it also
follows that the so-called usurpations with which history is littered are
the most excusable misdemeanors which men have committed. To usurp a
usurpation--that is all it amounts to, isn't it?

A prince is not to us what he is to a European, of course. We have not
been taught to regard him as a god, and so one good look at him is likely
to so nearly appease our curiosity as to make him an object of no greater
interest the next time. We want a fresh one. But it is not so with the
European. I am quite sure of it. The same old one will answer; he never
stales. Eighteen years ago I was in London and I called at an
Englishman's house on a bleak and foggy and dismal December afternoon to
visit his wife and married daughter by appointment. I waited half an hour
and then they arrived, frozen. They explained that they had been delayed
by an unlooked-for circumstance: while passing in the neighborhood of
Marlborough House they saw a crowd gathering and were told that the
Prince of Wales was about to drive out, so they stopped to get a sight of
him. They had waited half an hour on the sidewalk, freezing with the
crowd, but were disappointed at last--the Prince had changed his mind. I
said, with a good deal of surprise, "Is it possible that you two have
lived in London all your lives and have never seen the Prince of Wales?"

Apparently it was their turn to be surprised, for they exclaimed: "What
an idea! Why, we have seen him hundreds of times."

They had seem him hundreds of times, yet they had waited half an hour in
the gloom and the bitter cold, in the midst of a jam of patients from the
same asylum, on the chance of seeing him again. It was a stupefying
statement, but one is obliged to believe the English, even when they say
a thing like that. I fumbled around for a remark, and got out this one:

"I can't understand it at all. If I had never seen General Grant I doubt
if I would do that even to get a sight of him." With a slight emphasis on
the last word.

Their blank faces showed that they wondered where the parallel came in.
Then they said, blankly: "Of course not. He is only a President."

It is doubtless a fact that a prince is a permanent interest, an interest
not subject to deterioration. The general who was never defeated, the
general who never held a council of war, the only general who ever
commanded a connected battle-front twelve hundred miles long, the smith
who welded together the broken parts of a great republic and
re-established it where it is quite likely to outlast all the monarchies
present and to come, was really a person of no serious consequence to
these people. To them, with their training, my General was only a man,
after all, while their Prince was clearly much more than that--a being of
a wholly unsimilar construction and constitution, and being of no more
blood and kinship with men than are the serene eternal lights of the
firmament with the poor dull tallow candles of commerce that sputter and
die and leave nothing behind but a pinch of ashes and a stink.

I saw the last act of "Tannh:auser." I sat in the gloom and the deep
stillness, waiting--one minute, two minutes, I do not know exactly how
long--then the soft music of the hidden orchestra began to breathe its
rich, long sighs out from under the distant stage, and by and by the
drop-curtain parted in the middle and was drawn softly aside, disclosing
the twilighted wood and a wayside shrine, with a white-robed girl praying
and a man standing near. Presently that noble chorus of men's voices was
heard approaching, and from that moment until the closing of the curtain
it was music, just music--music to make one drunk with pleasure, music to
make one take scrip and staff and beg his way round the globe to hear it.

To such as are intending to come here in the Wagner season next year I
wish to say, bring your dinner-pail with you. If you do, you will never
cease to be thankful. If you do not, you will find it a hard fight to
save yourself from famishing in Bayreuth. Bayreuth is merely a large
village, and has no very large hotels or eating-houses. The principal
inns are the Golden Anchor and the Sun. At either of these places you
can get an excellent meal--no, I mean you can go there and see other
people get it. There is no charge for this. The town is littered with
restaurants, but they are small and bad, and they are overdriven with
custom. You must secure a table hours beforehand, and often when you
arrive you will find somebody occupying it. We have had this experience.
We have had a daily scramble for life; and when I say we, I include
shoals of people. I have the impression that the only people who do not
have to scramble are the veterans--the disciples who have been here
before and know the ropes. I think they arrive about a week before the
first opera, and engage all the tables for the season. My tribe had
tried all kinds of places--some outside of the town, a mile or two--and
have captured only nibblings and odds and ends, never in any instance a
complete and satisfying meal. Digestible? No, the reverse. These odds
and ends are going to serve as souvenirs of Bayreuth, and in that regard
their value is not to be overestimated. Photographs fade, bric-a-brac
gets lost, busts of Wagner get broken, but once you absorb a
Bayreuth-restaurant meal it is your possession and your property until
the time comes to embalm the rest of you. Some of these pilgrims here
become, in effect, cabinets; cabinets of souvenirs of Bayreuth. It is
believed among scientists that you could examine the crop of a dead
Bayreuth pilgrim anywhere in the earth and tell where he came from. But
I like this ballast. I think a "Hermitage" scrap-up at eight in the
evening, when all the famine-breeders have been there and laid in their
mementoes and gone, is the quietest thing you can lay on your keelson
except gravel.