Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (467 page)

“Why she’s so tied up, she can’t walk straight,” was the only impression she left upon him.

We changed the subject; it irritated me to hear him talk. The beautiful Juno-like creatures we came across further on in Germany, he said were too fat. He wanted to see them run. I found him utterly soulless.

To expect a boy to love learning and culture is like expecting him to prefer old vintage claret to gooseberry wine. Culture for the majority is an acquired taste. Speaking personally, I am entirely in agreement with the University professor. I find knowledge, prompting to observation and leading to reflection, the most satisfactory luggage with which a traveller through life can provide himself. I would that I had more of it. To be able to enjoy a picture is of more advantage than to be able to buy it.

All that the University professor can urge in favour of idealism I am prepared to endorse. But then I am — let us say, thirty-nine. At fourteen my candid opinion was that he was talking “rot.” I looked at the old gentleman himself — a narrow-chested, spectacled old gentleman, who lived up a by street. He did not seem to have much fun of any sort. It was not my ideal. He told me things had been written in a language called Greek that I should enjoy reading, but I had not even read all Captain Marryat. There were tales by Sir Walter Scott and “Jack Harkaway’s Schooldays!” I felt I could wait a while. There was a chap called Aristophanes who had written comedies, satirising the political institutions of a country that had disappeared two thousand years ago. I say, without shame, Drury Lane pantomime and Barnum’s Circus called to me more strongly.

Wishing to give the old gentleman a chance, I dipped into translations. Some of these old fellows were not as bad as I had imagined them. A party named Homer had written some really interesting stuff. Here and there, maybe, he was a bit long-winded, but, taking him as a whole, there was “go” in him. There was another of them — Ovid was his name. He could tell a story, Ovid could. He had imagination. He was almost as good as “Robinson Crusoe.” I thought it would please my professor, telling him that I was reading these, his favourite authors.

“Reading them!” he cried, “but you don’t know Greek or Latin.”

“But I know English,” I answered; “they have all been translated into English. You never told me that!”

It appeared it was not the same thing. There were subtle delicacies of diction bound to escape even the best translator. These subtle delicacies of diction I could enjoy only by devoting the next seven or eight years of my life to the study of Greek and Latin. It will grieve the University professor to hear it, but the enjoyment of those subtle delicacies of diction did not appear to me — I was only fourteen at the time, please remember — to be worth the time and trouble.

The boy is materially inclined — the mourning American professor has discovered it. I did not want to be an idealist living up a back street. I wanted to live in the biggest house in the best street of the town. I wanted to ride a horse, wear a fur coat, and have as much to eat and drink as ever I liked. I wanted to marry the most beautiful woman in the world, to have my name in the newspaper, and to know that everybody was envying me.

Mourn over it, my dear professor, as you will — that is the ideal of youth; and, so long as human nature remains what it is, will continue to be so. It is a materialistic ideal — a sordid ideal. Maybe it is necessary. Maybe the world would not move much if the young men started thinking too early. They want to be rich, so they fling themselves frenziedly into the struggle. They build the towns, and make the railway tracks, hew down the forests, dig the ore out of the ground. There comes a day when it is borne in upon them that trying to get rich is a poor sort of game — that there is only one thing more tiresome than being a millionaire, and that is trying to be a millionaire. But, meanwhile, the world has got its work done.

The American professor fears that the artistic development of America leaves much to be desired. I fear the artistic development of most countries leaves much to be desired. Why the Athenians themselves sandwiched their drama between wrestling competitions and boxing bouts. The plays of Sophocles, or Euripides, were given as “side shows.” The chief items of the fair were the games and races. Besides, America is still a young man. It has been busy “getting on in the world.” It has not yet quite finished. Yet there are signs that young America is approaching the thirty-nines. He is finding a little time, a little money to spare for art. One can almost hear young America — not quite so young as he was — saying to Mrs. Europe as he enters and closes the shop door:

“Well, ma’am, here I am, and maybe you’ll be glad to hear I’ve a little money to spend. Yes, ma’am, I’ve fixed things all right across the water; we shan’t starve. So now, ma’am, you and I can have a chat concerning this art I’ve been hearing so much about. Let’s have a look at it, ma’am, trot it out, and don’t you be afraid of putting a fair price upon it.”

I am inclined to think that Mrs. Europe has not hesitated to put a good price upon the art she has sold to Uncle Sam. I am afraid Mrs. Europe has occasionally “unloaded” on Uncle Sam. I talked to a certain dealer one afternoon, now many years ago, at the Uwantit Club.

“What is the next picture likely to be missing?” I asked him in the course of general conversation.

“Thome little thing of Hoppner’th, if it mutht be,” he replied with confidence.

“Hoppner,” I murmured, “I seem to have heard the name.”

“Yeth; you’ll hear it a bit oftener during the next eighteen month or tho. You take care you don’t get tired of hearing it, thath all,” he laughed. “Yeth,” he continued, thoughtfully, “Reynoldth ith played out. Nothing much to be made of Gainthborough, either. Dealing in that lot now, why, it’th like keeping a potht offith. Hoppner’th the coming man.”

“You’ve been buying Hoppners up cheap,” I suggested.

“Between uth,” he answered, “yeth, I think we’ve got them all. Maybe a few more. I don’t think we’ve mithed any.”

“You will sell them for more than you gave for them,” I hinted.

“You’re thmart,” he answered, regarding me admiringly, “you thee through everything you do.”

“How do you work it?” I asked him. There is a time in the day when he is confidential. “Here is this man, Hoppner. I take it that you have bought him up at an average of a hundred pounds a picture, and that at that price most owners were fairly glad to sell. Few folks outside the art schools have ever heard of him. I bet that at the present moment there isn’t one art critic who could spell his name without reference to a dictionary. In eighteen months you will be selling him for anything from one thousand to ten thousand pounds. How is it done?”

“How ith everything done that’th done well?” he answered. “By earnetht effort.” He hitched his chair nearer to me, “I get a chap — one of your thort of chapth — he writ’th an article about Hoppner. I get another to anthwer him. Before I’ve done there’ll be a hundred articleth about Hoppner — hith life, hith early thruggie, anecdo’th about hith wife. Then a Hoppner will be thold at public auchtion for a thouthand guineath.”

“But how can you be certain it will fetch a thousand guineas?” I interrupted.

“I happen to know the man whoth going to buy it.” He winked, and I understood.

“A fortnight later there will be a thale of half-a-dothen, and the prithe will be gone up by that time.”

“And after that?” I said.

“After that,” he replied, rising, “the American millionaire! He’ll jutht be waiting on the door-thtep for the thale-room to open.”

“If by any chance I come across a Hoppner?” I said, laughing, as I turned to go.

“Don’t you hold on to it too long, that’th all,” was his advice.

HOW MANY CHARMS HATH MUSIC, WOULD YOU SAY?

The argument of the late Herr Wagner was that grand opera — the music drama, as he called it — included, and therefore did away with the necessity for — all other arts. Music in all its branches, of course, it provides: so much I will concede to the late Herr Wagner. There are times, I confess, when my musical yearnings might shock the late Herr Wagner — times when I feel unequal to following three distinct themes at one and the same instant.

“Listen,” whispers the Wagnerian enthusiast to me, “the cornet has now the Brunnhilda motive.” It seems to me, in my then state of depravity, as if the cornet had even more than this the matter with him.

“The second violins,” continues the Wagnerian enthusiast, “are carrying on the Wotan theme.” That they are carrying on goes without saying: the players’ faces are streaming with perspiration.

“The brass,” explains my friend — his object is to cultivate my ear—”is accompanying the singers.” I should have said drowning them. There are occasions when I can rave about Wagner with the best of them. High class moods come to all of us. The difference between the really high-class man and us commonplace, workaday men is the difference between, say, the eagle and the barnyard chicken. I am the barnyard chicken. I have my wings. There are ecstatic moments when I feel I want to spurn the sordid earth and soar into the realms of art. I do fly a little, but my body is heavy, and I only get as far as the fence. After a while I find it lonesome on the fence, and I hop down again among my fellows.

Listening to Wagner, during such temporary Philistinic mood, my sense of fair play is outraged. A lone, lorn woman stands upon the stage trying to make herself heard. She has to do this sort of thing for her living; maybe an invalid mother, younger brothers and sisters are dependent upon her. One hundred and forty men, all armed with powerful instruments, well-organised, and most of them looking well-fed, combine to make it impossible for a single note of that poor woman’s voice to be heard above their din. I see her standing there, opening and shutting her mouth, getting redder and redder in the face. She is singing, one feels sure of it; one could hear her if only those one hundred and forty men would ease up for a minute. She makes one mighty, supreme effort; above the banging of the drums, the blare of the trumpets, the shrieking of the strings, that last despairing note is distinctly heard.

She has won, but the victory has cost her dear. She sinks down fainting on the stage and is carried off by supers. Chivalrous indignation has made it difficult for me to keep my seat watching the unequal contest. My instinct was to leap the barrier, hurl the bald-headed chief of her enemies from his high chair, and lay about me with the trombone or the clarionet — whichever might have come the easier to my snatch.

“You cowardly lot of bullies,” I have wanted to cry, “are you not ashamed of yourselves? A hundred and forty of you against one, and that one a still beautiful and, comparatively speaking, young lady. Be quiet for a minute — can’t you? Give the poor girl a chance.”

A lady of my acquaintance says that sitting out a Wagnerian opera seems to her like listening to a singer accompanied by four orchestras playing different tunes at the same time. As I have said, there are times when Wagner carries me along with him, when I exult in the crash and whirl of his contending harmonies. But, alas! there are those other moods — those after dinner moods — when my desire is for something distinctly resembling a tune. Still, there are other composers of grand opera besides Wagner. I grant to the late Herr Wagner, that, in so far as music is concerned, opera can supply us with all we can need.

But it was also Wagner’s argument that grand opera could supply us with acting, and there I am compelled to disagree with him. Wagner thought that the arts of acting and singing could be combined. I have seen artists the great man has trained himself. As singers they left nothing to be desired, but the acting in grand opera has never yet impressed me. Wagner never succeeded in avoiding the operatic convention and nobody else ever will. When the operatic lover meets his sweetheart he puts her in a corner and, turning his back upon her, comes down to the footlights and tells the audience how he adores her. When he has finished, he, in his turn, retires into the corner, and she comes down and tells the audience that she is simply mad about him.

Overcome with joy at finding she really cares for him, he comes down right and says that this is the happiest moment of his life; and she stands left, twelve feet away from him, and has the presentiment that all this sort of thing is much too good to last. They go off together, backwards, side by side. If there is any love-making, such as I understand by the term, it is done “off.” This is not my idea of acting. But I do not see how you are going to substitute for it anything more natural. When you are singing at the top of your voice, you don’t want a heavy woman hanging round your neck. When you are killing a man and warbling about it at the same time, you don’t want him fooling around you defending himself. You want him to have a little reasonable patience, and to wait in his proper place till you have finished, telling him, or rather telling the crowd, how much you hate and despise him.

When the proper time comes, and if he is where you expect to find him while thinking of your upper C, you will hit him lightly on the shoulder with your sword, and then he can die to his own particular tune. If you have been severely wounded in battle, or in any other sort of row, and have got to sing a long ballad before you finally expire, you don’t want to have to think how a man would really behave who knew he had only got a few minutes to live and was feeling bad about it. The chances are that he would not want to sing at all. The woman who really loved him would not encourage him to sing. She would want him to keep quiet while she moved herself about a bit, in case there was anything that could be done for him.

If a mob is climbing the stairs thirsting for your blood, you do not want to stand upright with your arms stretched out, a good eighteen inches from the door, while you go over at some length the varied incidents leading up to the annoyance. If your desire were to act naturally you would push against that door for all you were worth, and yell for somebody to bring you a chest of drawers and a bedstead, and things like that, to pile up against it. If you were a king, and were giving a party, you would not want your guests to fix you up at the other end of the room and leave you there, with nobody to talk to but your own wife, while they turned their backs upon you, and had a long and complicated dance all to themselves. You would want to be in it; you would want to let them know that you were king.