What Is Man?

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


THURSDAY.--They keep two teams of singers in stock for the chief roles,
and one of these is composed of the most renowned artists in the world,
with Materna and Alvary in the lead. I suppose a double team is
necessary; doubtless a single team would die of exhaustion in a week, for
all the plays last from four in the afternoon till ten at night. Nearly
all the labor falls upon the half-dozen head singers, and apparently they
are required to furnish all the noise they can for the money. If they
feel a soft, whispery, mysterious feeling they are required to open out
and let the public know it. Operas are given only on Sundays, Mondays,
Wednesdays, and Thursdays, with three days of ostensible rest per week,
and two teams to do the four operas; but the ostensible rest is devoted
largely to rehearsing. It is said that the off days are devoted to
rehearsing from some time in the morning till ten at night. Are there
two orchestras also? It is quite likely, since there are one hundred and
ten names in the orchestra list.

Yesterday the opera was "Tristan and Isolde." I have seen all sorts of
audiences--at theaters, operas, concerts, lectures, sermons,
funerals--but none which was twin to the Wagner audience of Bayreuth for
fixed and reverential attention. Absolute attention and petrified
retention to the end of an act of the attitude assumed at the beginning
of it. You detect no movement in the solid mass of heads and shoulders.
You seem to sit with the dead in the gloom of a tomb. You know that they
are being stirred to their profoundest depths; that there are times when
they want to rise and wave handkerchiefs and shout their approbation, and
times when tears are running down their faces, and it would be a relief
to free their pent emotions in sobs or screams; yet you hear not one
utterance till the curtain swings together and the closing strains have
slowly faded out and died; then the dead rise with one impulse and shake
the building with their applause. Every seat is full in the first act;
there is not a vacant one in the last. If a man would be conspicuous,
let him come here and retire from the house in the midst of an act. It
would make him celebrated.

This audience reminds me of nothing I have ever seen and of nothing I
have read about except the city in the Arabian tale where all the
inhabitants have been turned to brass and the traveler finds them after
centuries mute, motionless, and still retaining the attitudes which they
last knew in life. Here the Wagner audience dress as they please, and
sit in the dark and worship in silence. At the Metropolitan in New York
they sit in a glare, and wear their showiest harness; they hum airs, they
squeak fans, they titter, and they gabble all the time. In some of the
boxes the conversation and laughter are so loud as to divide the
attention of the house with the stage. In large measure the Metropolitan
is a show-case for rich fashionables who are not trained in Wagnerian
music and have no reverence for it, but who like to promote art and show
their clothes.

Can that be an agreeable atmosphere to persons in whom this music
produces a sort of divine ecstasy and to whom its creator is a very
deity, his stage a temple, the works of his brain and hands consecrated
things, and the partaking of them with eye and ear a sacred solemnity?
Manifestly, no. Then, perhaps the temporary expatriation, the tedious
traversing of seas and continents, the pilgrimage to Bayreuth stands
explained. These devotees would worship in an atmosphere of devotion.
It is only here that they can find it without fleck or blemish or any
worldly pollution. In this remote village there are no sights to see,
there is no newspaper to intrude the worries of the distant world, there
is nothing going on, it is always Sunday. The pilgrim wends to his
temple out of town, sits out his moving service, returns to his bed with
his heart and soul and his body exhausted by long hours of tremendous
emotion, and he is in no fit condition to do anything but to lie torpid
and slowly gather back life and strength for the next service. This
opera of "Tristan and Isolde" last night broke the hearts of all
witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some who have heard of
many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel
strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a
community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all
others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and
always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.

But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that this is one of
the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I have never seen
anything like this before. I have never seen anything so great and fine
and real as this devotion.

FRIDAY.--Yesterday's opera was "Parsifal" again. The others went and
they show marked advance in appreciation; but I went hunting for relics
and reminders of the Margravine Wilhelmina, she of the imperishable
"Memoirs." I am properly grateful to her for her (unconscious) satire
upon monarchy and nobility, and therefore nothing which her hand touched
or her eye looked upon is indifferent to me. I am her pilgrim; the rest
of this multitude here are Wagner's.

TUESDAY.--I have seen my last two operas; my season is ended, and we
cross over into Bohemia this afternoon. I was supposing that my musical
regeneration was accomplished and perfected, because I enjoyed both of
these operas, singing and all, and, moreover, one of them was "Parsifal,"
but the experts have disenchanted me. They say:

"Singing! That wasn't singing; that was the wailing, screeching of
third-rate obscurities, palmed off on us in the interest of economy."

Well, I ought to have recognized the sign--the old, sure sign that has
never failed me in matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it
means that it is mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has
saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a
chromo. However, my base instinct does bring me profit sometimes; I was
the only man out of thirty-two hundred who got his money back on those
two operas.

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS



Is it true that the sun of a man's mentality touches noon at forty and
then begins to wane toward setting? Doctor Osler is charged with saying
so. Maybe he said it, maybe he didn't; I don't know which it is. But if
he said it, I can point him to a case which proves his rule. Proves it
by being an exception to it. To this place I nominate Mr. Howells.

I read his VENETIAN DAYS about forty years ago. I compare it with his
paper on Machiavelli in a late number of HARPER, and I cannot find that
his English has suffered any impairment. For forty years his English has
been to me a continual delight and astonishment. In the sustained
exhibition of certain great qualities--clearness, compression, verbal
exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of
phrasing--he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English-writing
world. SUSTAINED. I entrench myself behind that protecting word. There
are others who exhibit those great qualities as greatly as he does, but
only by intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of
veiled and dimmer landscape between; whereas Howells's moon sails
cloudless skies all night and all the nights.

In the matter of verbal exactness Mr. Howells has no superior, I suppose.
He seems to be almost always able to find that elusive and shifty grain
of gold, the RIGHT WORD. Others have to put up with approximations, more
or less frequently; he has better luck. To me, the others are miners
working with the gold-pan--of necessity some of the gold washes over and
escapes; whereas, in my fancy, he is quicksilver raiding down a
riffle--no grain of the metal stands much chance of eluding him. A
powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader's way and makes it
plain; a close approximation to it will answer, and much traveling is
done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do not welcome it and
applaud it and rejoice in it as we do when THE right one blazes out on
us. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book
or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and
electrically prompt: it tingles exquisitely around through the walls of
the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn-butter that
creams the sumac-berry. One has no time to examine the word and vote
upon its rank and standing, the automatic recognition of its supremacy is
so immediate. There is a plenty of acceptable literature which deals
largely in approximations, but it may be likened to a fine landscape seen
through the rain; the right word would dismiss the rain, then you would
see it better. It doesn't rain when Howells is at work.

And where does he get the easy and effortless flow of his speech? and its
cadenced and undulating rhythm? and its architectural felicities of
construction, its graces of expression, its pemmican quality of
compression, and all that? Born to him, no doubt. All in shining good
order in the beginning, all extraordinary; and all just as shining, just
as extraordinary today, after forty years of diligent wear and tear and
use. He passed his fortieth year long and long ago; but I think his
English of today--his perfect English, I wish to say--can throw down the
glove before his English of that antique time and not be afraid.

I will got back to the paper on Machiavelli now, and ask the reader to
examine this passage from it which I append. I do not mean examine it in
a bird's-eye way; I mean search it, study it. And, of course, read it
aloud. I may be wrong, still it is my conviction that one cannot get out
of finely wrought literature all that is in it by reading it mutely:

Mr. Dyer is rather of the opinion, first luminously suggested by
Macaulay, that Machiavelli was in earnest, but must not be judged as a
political moralist of our time and race would be judged. He thinks that
Machiavelli was in earnest, as none but an idealist can be, and he is the
first to imagine him an idealist immersed in realities, who involuntarily
transmutes the events under his eye into something like the visionary
issues of reverie. The Machiavelli whom he depicts does not cease to be
politically a republican and socially a just man because he holds up an
atrocious despot like Caesar Borgia as a mirror for rulers. What
Machiavelli beheld round him in Italy was a civic disorder in which there
was oppression without statecraft, and revolt without patriotism. When a
miscreant like Borgia appeared upon the scene and reduced both tyrants
and rebels to an apparent quiescence, he might very well seem to such a
dreamer the savior of society whom a certain sort of dreamers are always
looking for. Machiavelli was no less honest when he honored the
diabolical force than Carlyle was when at different times he extolled the
strong man who destroys liberty in creating order. But Carlyle has only
just ceased to be mistaken for a reformer, while it is still
Machiavelli's hard fate to be so trammeled in his material that his name
stands for whatever is most malevolent and perfidious in human nature.

You see how easy and flowing it is; how unvexed by ruggednesses,
clumsinesses, broken meters; how simple and--so far as you or I can make
out--unstudied; how clear, how limpid, how understandable, how unconfused
by cross-currents, eddies, undertows; how seemingly unadorned, yet is all
adornment, like the lily-of-the-valley; and how compressed, how compact,
without a complacency-signal hung out anywhere to call attention to it.

There are twenty-three lines in the quoted passage. After reading it
several times aloud, one perceives that a good deal of matter is crowded
into that small space. I think it is a model of compactness. When I
take its materials apart and work them over and put them together in my
way, I find I cannot crowd the result back into the same hole, there not
being room enough. I find it a case of a woman packing a man's trunk: he
can get the things out, but he can't ever get them back again.

The proffered paragraph is a just and fair sample; the rest of the
article is as compact as it is; there are no waste words. The sample is
just in other ways: limpid, fluent, graceful, and rhythmical as it is, it
holds no superiority in these respects over the rest of the essay. Also,
the choice phrasing noticeable in the sample is not lonely; there is a
plenty of its kin distributed through the other paragraphs. This is
claiming much when that kin must face the challenge of a phrase like the
one in the middle sentence: "an idealist immersed in realities who
involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into something like the
visionary issues of reverie." With a hundred words to do it with, the
literary artisan could catch that airy thought and tie it down and reduce
it to a concrete condition, visible, substantial, understandable and all
right, like a cabbage; but the artist does it with twenty, and the result
is a flower.

The quoted phrase, like a thousand others that have come from the same
source, has the quality of certain scraps of verse which take hold of us
and stay in our memories, we do not understand why, at first: all the
words being the right words, none of them is conspicuous, and so they all
seem inconspicuous, therefore we wonder what it is about them that makes
their message take hold.

The mossy marbles rest On the lips that he has prest In their bloom,

And the names he loved to hear Have been carved for many a year On the
tomb.

It is like a dreamy strain of moving music, with no sharp notes in it.
The words are all "right" words, and all the same size. We do not notice
it at first. We get the effect, it goes straight home to us, but we do
not know why. It is when the right words are conspicuous that they
thunder:

The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome!

When I got back from Howells old to Howells young I find him arranging
and clustering English words well, but not any better than now. He is
not more felicitous in concreting abstractions now than he was in
translating, then, the visions of the eyes of flesh into words that
reproduced their forms and colors:

In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest. It is at once
shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked FACCHINI; and now in
St. Mark's Place the music of innumerable shovels smote upon my ear; and
I saw the shivering legion of poverty as it engaged the elements in a
struggle for the possession of the Piazza. But the snow continued to
fall, and through the twilight of the descending flakes all this toil and
encountered looked like that weary kind of effort in dreams, when the
most determined industry seems only to renew the task. The lofty crest
of the bell-tower was hidden in the folds of falling snow, and I could no
longer see the golden angel upon its summit. But looked at across the
Piazza, the beautiful outline of St. Mark's Church was perfectly penciled
in the air, and the shifting threads of the snowfall were woven into a
spell of novel enchantment around the structure that always seemed to me
too exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be anything but the creation
of magic. The tender snow had compassionated the beautiful edifice for
all the wrongs of time, and so hid the stains and ugliness of decay that
it looked as if just from the hand of the builder--or, better said, just
from the brain of the architect. There was marvelous freshness in the
colors of the mosaics in the great arches of the facade, and all that
gracious harmony into which the temple rises, or marble scrolls and leafy
exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was a hundred
times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the drifting flakes.
The snow lay lightly on the golden gloves that tremble like
peacocks-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest white;
it robed the saints in ermine; and it danced over all its works, as if
exulting in its beauty--beauty which filled me with subtle, selfish
yearning to keep such evanescent loveliness for the little-while-longer
of my whole life, and with despair to think that even the poor lifeless
shadow of it could never be fairly reflected in picture or poem.

Through the wavering snowfall, the Saint Theodore upon one of the granite
pillars of the Piazzetta did not show so grim as his wont is, and the
winged lion on the other might have been a winged lamb, so gentle and
mild he looked by the tender light of the storm. The towers of the
island churches loomed faint and far away in the dimness; the sailors in
the rigging of the ships that lay in the Basin wrought like phantoms
among the shrouds; the gondolas stole in and out of the opaque distance
more noiselessly and dreamily than ever; and a silence, almost palpable,
lay upon the mutest city in the world.

The spirit of Venice is there: of a city where Age and Decay, fagged
with distributing damage and repulsiveness among the other cities of the
planet in accordance with the policy and business of their profession,
come for rest and play between seasons, and treat themselves to the
luxury and relaxation of sinking the shop and inventing and squandering
charms all about, instead of abolishing such as they find, as it their
habit when not on vacation.

In the working season they do business in Boston sometimes, and a
character in THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY takes accurate note of pathetic
effects wrought by them upon the aspects of a street of once dignified
and elegant homes whose occupants have moved away and left them a prey to
neglect and gradual ruin and progressive degradation; a descent which
reaches bottom at last, when the street becomes a roost for humble
professionals of the faith-cure and fortune-telling sort.

What a queer, melancholy house, what a queer, melancholy street! I
don't think I was ever in a street before when quite so many professional
ladies, with English surnames, preferred Madam to Mrs. on their
door-plates. And the poor old place has such a desperately conscious air
of going to the deuce. Every house seems to wince as you go by, and
button itself up to the chin for fear you should find out it had no shirt
on--so to speak. I don't know what's the reason, but these material
tokens of a social decay afflict me terribly; a tipsy woman isn't
dreadfuler than a haggard old house, that's once been a home, in a street
like this.

Mr. Howells's pictures are not mere stiff, hard, accurate photographs;
they are photographs with feeling in them, and sentiment, photographs
taken in a dream, one might say.

As concerns his humor, I will not try to say anything, yet I would try,
if I had the words that might approximately reach up to its high place.
I do not think any one else can play with humorous fancies so gracefully
and delicately and deliciously as he does, nor has so many to play with,
nor can come so near making them look as if they were doing the playing
themselves and he was not aware that they were at it. For they are
unobtrusive, and quiet in their ways, and well conducted. His is a humor
which flows softly all around about and over and through the mesh of the
page, pervasive, refreshing, health-giving, and makes no more show and no
more noise than does the circulation of the blood.

There is another thing which is contentingly noticeable in Mr. Howells's
books. That is his "stage directions"--those artifices which authors
employ to throw a kind of human naturalness around a scene and a
conversation, and help the reader to see the one and get at meanings in
the other which might not be perceived if entrusted unexplained to the
bare words of the talk. Some authors overdo the stage directions, they
elaborate them quite beyond necessity; they spend so much time and take
up so much room in telling us how a person said a thing and how he looked
and acted when he said it that we get tired and vexed and wish he hadn't
said it all. Other authors' directions are brief enough, but it is
seldom that the brevity contains either wit or information. Writers of
this school go in rags, in the matter of state directions; the majority
of them having nothing in stock but a cigar, a laugh, a blush, and a
bursting into tears. In their poverty they work these sorry things to
the bone. They say:

". . . replied Alfred, flipping the ash from his cigar." (This explains
nothing; it only wastes space.)

". . . responded Richard, with a laugh." (There was nothing to laugh
about; there never is. The writer puts it in from habit--automatically;
he is paying no attention to his work; or he would see that there is
nothing to laugh at; often, when a remark is unusually and poignantly
flat and silly, he tries to deceive the reader by enlarging the stage
direction and making Richard break into "frenzies of uncontrollable
laughter." This makes the reader sad.)

". . . murmured Gladys, blushing." (This poor old shop-worn blush is a
tiresome thing. We get so we would rather Gladys would fall out of the
book and break her neck than do it again. She is always doing it, and
usually irrelevantly. Whenever it is her turn to murmur she hangs out
her blush; it is the only thing she's got. In a little while we hate
her, just as we do Richard.)

". . . repeated Evelyn, bursting into tears." (This kind keep a book
damp all the time. They can't say a thing without crying. They cry so
much about nothing that by and by when they have something to cry ABOUT
they have gone dry; they sob, and fetch nothing; we are not moved. We
are only glad.)

They gavel me, these stale and overworked stage directions, these carbon
films that got burnt out long ago and cannot now carry any faintest
thread of light. It would be well if they could be relieved from duty
and flung out in the literary back yard to rot and disappear along with
the discarded and forgotten "steeds" and "halidomes" and similar
stage-properties once so dear to our grandfathers. But I am friendly to
Mr. Howells's stage directions; more friendly to them than to any one
else's, I think. They are done with a competent and discriminating art,
and are faithful to the requirements of a state direction's proper and
lawful office, which is to inform. Sometimes they convey a scene and its
conditions so well that I believe I could see the scene and get the
spirit and meaning of the accompanying dialogue if some one would read
merely the stage directions to me and leave out the talk. For instance,
a scene like this, from THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY:

". . . and she laid her arms with a beseeching gesture on her father's
shoulder."

". . . she answered, following his gesture with a glance."

". . . she said, laughing nervously."

". . . she asked, turning swiftly upon him that strange, searching
glance."

". . . she answered, vaguely."

". . . she reluctantly admitted."

". . . but her voice died wearily away, and she stood looking into his
face with puzzled entreaty."

Mr. Howells does not repeat his forms, and does not need to; he can
invent fresh ones without limit. It is mainly the repetition over and
over again, by the third-rates, of worn and commonplace and juiceless
forms that makes their novels such a weariness and vexation to us, I
think. We do not mind one or two deliveries of their wares, but as we
turn the pages over and keep on meeting them we presently get tired of
them and wish they would do other things for a change.

". . . replied Alfred, flipping the ash from his cigar."

". . . responded Richard, with a laugh."

". . . murmured Gladys, blushing."

". . . repeated Evelyn, bursting into tears."

". . . replied the Earl, flipping the ash from his cigar."

". . . responded the undertaker, with a laugh."

". . . murmured the chambermaid, blushing."

". . . repeated the burglar, bursting into tears."

". . . replied the conductor, flipping the ash from his cigar."

". . . responded Arkwright, with a laugh."

". . . murmured the chief of police, blushing."

". . . repeated the house-cat, bursting into tears."

And so on and so on; till at last it ceases to excite. I always notice
stage directions, because they fret me and keep me trying to get out of
their way, just as the automobiles do. At first; then by and by they
become monotonous and I get run over.

Mr. Howells has done much work, and the spirit of it is as beautiful as
the make of it. I have held him in admiration and affection so many
years that I know by the number of those years that he is old now; but
his heart isn't, nor his pen; and years do not count. Let him have
plenty of them; there is profit in them for us.





ENGLISH AS SHE IS TAUGHT

In the appendix to Croker's Boswell's Johnson one finds this anecdote:

CATO'S SOLILOQUY.--One day Mrs. Gastrel set a little girl to repeat to
him [Dr. Samuel Johnson] Cato's Soliloquy, which she went through very
correctly. The Doctor, after a pause, asked the child: