A Frenchman in America: Recollections of Men and Things

I read in the papers: “Prince Saunders, colored, was hanged here (Plaquemine, Fla.) yesterday. He declared he had made his peace with God, and his sins had been forgiven. Saunders murdered Rhody Walker, his sweetheart, last December, a few hours after he had witnessed the execution of Carter Wilkinson.”

If Saunders has made his peace with God, I hope his executioners have made theirs with God and man. What an indictment against man! What an argument against capital punishment! Here is a man committing a murder on returning from witnessing an execution. And there are men still to be found who declare that capital punishment deters men from committing murder!

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    Indianapolis, March 14.

Arrived here yesterday afternoon. Met James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier poet. Mr. Riley is a man of about thirty, a genuine poet, full of pathos and humor, and a great reciter. No one, I imagine, could give his poetry as he does himself. He is a born actor, who holds you in suspense, and makes you cry or laugh just as he pleases. I remember, when two years ago Mr. Augustin Daly gave a farewell supper to Mr. Henry Irving and Miss Ellen Terry at Delmonico’s, Mr. Riley recited one of his poems at table. He gave most of us a big lump in our throats, and Miss Terry had tears rolling down her cheeks.

…

The veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic are having a great field day in Indianapolis. They have come here to attend meetings and ask for pensions, so as to reduce that unmanageable surplus. Indianapolis is full, and the management of Denison House does not know which way to turn. All these veterans have large, broad-brimmed soft hats and are covered all over with badges and ribbons. Their wives and daughters, members of some patriotic association, have come with them. It is a huge picnic. The entrance hall is crowded all day. The spittoons have been replaced by tubs for the occasion. Chewing is in favor all over America, but the State of Indiana beats, in that way, everything I have seen before.

…

Went to see Clara Morris in Adolphe Belot’s “Article 47,” at the Opera House, last night. Clara Morris is a powerful actress, but, like most actors and actresses who go “starring” through America, badly supported. I watched the audience with great interest. Nineteen mouths out of twenty were chewing – the men tobacco, the women gum impregnated with peppermint. All the jaws were going like those of so many ruminants grazing in a field. From the box I occupied the sight was most amusing.

On returning to Denison House from the theater, I went to have a smoke in a quiet corner of the hall, far from the crowd. By and by two men, most smartly dressed, with diamond pins in their cravats, and flowers embroidered on their waistcoats, came and sat opposite me. I thought they had chosen the place to have a quiet chat together. Not so. One pushed a cuspidore with his foot and brought it between the two chairs. There, for half an hour, without saying one word to each other, they chewed, hawked, and spat – and had a good time before going to bed.

…

Trewey is nowhere as an equilibrist, compared to a gallant veteran who breakfasted at my table, this morning. Among the different courses brought to him were two boiled eggs, almost raw, poured into a tumbler according to the American fashion. Without spilling a drop, he managed to eat those eggs with the end of his knife. It was marvelous. I have never seen the like of it, even in Germany, where the knife trick is practiced from the tenderest age.

In Europe, swaggering little boys smoke; here they chew and spit, and look at you, as if to say: “See what a big man I am!”

CHAPTER XXXVI

Chicago (Second Visit) – Vassili Vereschagin’s Exhibition – The “Angelus” – Wagner and Wagnerites – Wanderings About the Big City – I Sit on the Tribunal

    Chicago, March 15.

Arrived here this morning and put up at the Grand Pacific Hotel. My lecture to-night at the Central Music Hall is advertised as a causerie. My local manager informs me that many people have inquired at the box-office what the meaning of that French word is. As he does not know himself, he could not enlighten them, but he thinks that curiosity will draw a good crowd to-night.

This puts me in mind of a little incident which took place about a year ago. I was to make my appearance before an afternoon audience in the fashionable town of Eastbourne. Not wishing to convey the idea of a serious and prosy discourse, I advised my manager to call the entertainment “A causerie.” The room was full and the affair passed off very well. But an old lady, who was a well-known patroness of such entertainments, did not put in an appearance. On being asked the next day why she was not present, she replied: “Well, to tell you the truth, when I saw that they had given the entertainment a French name, I was afraid it might be something not quite fit for me to hear.” Dear soul!

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    March 16.

My manager’s predictions were realized last night. I had a large audience, one of the keenest and the most responsive and appreciative I have ever had. I was introduced by Judge Elliott Anthony, of the Superior Court, in a short, witty, and graceful little speech. He spoke of Lafayette and of the debt of gratitude America owes to France for the help she received at her hands during the War of Independence. Before taking leave of me, Judge Anthony kindly invited me to pay a visit to the Superior Court next Wednesday.

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    March 17.

Dined yesterday with Mr. James W. Scott, proprietor of the Chicago Herald, one of the most flourishing newspapers in the United States, and in the evening went to see Richard Mansfield in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The play is a repulsive one, but the double impersonation gives the great actor a magnificent opportunity for the display of his histrionic powers. The house was crowded, though it was Sunday. The pick of Chicago society was not there, of course. Some years ago, I was told, a Sunday audience was mainly composed of men. To-day the women go as freely as the men. The “horrible” always has a great fascination for the masses, and Mansfield held his popular audience in a state of breathless suspense. There was a great deal of disappointment written on the faces when the light was turned down on the appearance of “Mr. Hyde,” with his horribly distorted features. A woman, sitting in a box next to the one I occupied, exclaimed, as “Hyde” came to explain his terrible secret to the doctor, in the fourth act, “What a shame, they are turning down the light again!”

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    March 18.

Spent yesterday in recreation intellectual – and otherwise. I like to see everything, and I have no objection to entering a dime museum. I went to one yesterday morning, and saw a bearded lady, a calf with two heads, a gorilla (stuffed), a girl with no arms, and other freaks of nature. The bearded lady had very, very masculine features, but honi soit qui mal y pense. I could not help thinking of one of General Horace Porter’s good stories. A school-master asks a little boy what his father is.

“Please, sir, papa told me not to tell.”

“Oh, never mind, it’s all right with me.”

“Please, sir, he is the bearded lady at the dime museum.”

From the museum I went to the free library in the City Hall. Dime museums and free libraries – such is America. The attendance at the free libraries increases rapidly every day, and the till at the dime museums diminishes with proportionate rapidity.

After lunch I paid a visit to the exhibition of Vassili Vereschagin’s pictures. What on earth could possess the talented Russian artist, whose coloring is so lovely, to expend his labor on such subjects! Pictures like those, which show the horrors of a campaign in all their hideousness, may serve a good purpose in creating a detestation of war in all who see them. Nothing short of such a motive in the artist could excuse the portrayal of such infamies. These pictures are so many nightmares which will certainly haunt my eyes and brain for days and nights to come. Battle scenes portrayed with a realism that is revolting, because, alas, only too true. The execution of nihilists in a dim, dreary, snow-covered waste. An execution of sepoys, the doomed rebels tied to the mouths of cannon about to be fired off. Scenes of torture, illustrative of the extent to which human suffering can be carried, give you cold shudders in every fiber of your body. One horrid canvas shows a deserted battlefield, the snow-covered ground littered with corpses that ravens are tearing and fighting for. But, perhaps worst of all, is a picture of a field, where, in the snow, lie the human remains of a company of Russian soldiers who have been surprised and slain by Turks. Among the bodies, outraged by horrible and nameless mutilations, walks a priest, swinging a censer. One seems to be pursued by, and impregnated with, a smell of cadaverous putrefaction. This collection of pictures is installed in a place which has been used for stabling horses in, and is reeking with stable odors and the carbolic acid that has been employed to neutralize them. Your sense of smell is in full sympathy with your horrified sense of sight: both are revolted.

…

Now, behind the three large rooms devoted to the Russian artist’s works was a small one, in which hung a single picture. You little guess that that picture was no other than Jean Francois Millet’s “Angelus.” Millet’s dear little “Angelus,” that hymn of resignation and peace, alongside of all this roar and carnage of battle! The exhibitor thought, perhaps, that a sedative might be needed after the strong dose of Vassili Vereschagin, but I imagine that no one who went into that little room after the others was in a mood to listen to Millet’s message.

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    March 19.

Yesterday morning I went to see the Richmond Libby Prison, a four-story, huge brick building which has been removed here from Richmond, over a distance of more than a thousand miles, across the mountains of Pennsylvania. This is, perhaps, as the circular says, an unparalleled feat in the history of the world. The prison has been converted into a museum, illustrating the Civil War and African Slavery in America. The visit proved very interesting. In the afternoon I had a drive through the beautiful parks of the city.

In the evening I went to see “Tannhäuser” at the Auditorium. Outside, the building looks more like a penitentiary than a place of amusement – a huge pile of masonry, built of great, rough, black-looking blocks of stone. Inside, it is magnificent. I do not know anything to compare with it for comfort, grandeur, and beauty. It can hold seven thousand people. The decorations are white and gold. The lighting is done by means of arc electric lights in the enormously lofty roof – lights which can be lowered at will. Mr. Peck kindly took me to see the inner workings of the stage. I should say “stages,” for there are three. The hydraulic machinery for raising and lowering them cost $200,000.

Madame Lehmann sang grandly. I imagine that she is the finest lady exponent of Wagner’s music alive. She not only sings the parts, but looks them. Built on grand lines and crowned with masses of blond hair, she seems, when she gives forth those volumes of clear tones, a Norse goddess strayed into the nineteenth century.

M. Gounod describes Wagner as an astounding prodigy, an aberration of genius, a dreamer haunted by the colossal. For years I had listened to Wagner’s music, and, like most of my compatriots, brought up on the tuneful airs of Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, Verdi, Auber, etc., I entirely failed to appreciate the music of the future. All I could say in its favor was some variation of the sentiment once expressed by Mr. Edgar W. Nye (“Bill Nye”) who, after giving the subject his mature consideration, said he came to the conclusion that Wagner’s music was not so bad as it sounded. But I own that since I went to Bayreuth and heard and saw the operas as there given, I began not only to see that they are beautiful, but why they are beautiful.

Wagnerian opera is a poetical and musical idealization of speech.

The fault that I, like many others, have fallen into, was that of listening to the voices instead of listening to the orchestra. The fact is, the voices could almost be dispensed with altogether. The orchestra gives you the beautiful poem in music, and the personages on the stage are really little more than illustrative puppets. They play about the same part in the work that pictures play in a book. Wagner’s method was something so new, so different to all we had been accustomed to, that it naturally provoked much indignation and enmity – not because it was bad, but because it was new. It was the old story of the Classicists and Romanticists over again.

If you wanted to write a symphony, illustrative of the pangs and miseries of a sufferer from toothache, you would, if you were a disciple of Wagner, write your orchestral score so that the instruments should convey to the listener the whole gamut of groans – the temporary relief, the return of the pain, the sudden disappearance of it on ringing the bell at the dentist’s door, the final wrench of extraction gone through by the poor patient. On the boards you would put a personage who, with voice and contortions, should help you, as pictorial illustrations help an author. Such is the Wagnerian method.

After the play I met a terrible Wagnerite. Most Wagnerites are terrible. They will not admit that anything can be discussed, much less criticised, in the works of the master. They are not admirers, disciples; they are worshipers. To them Wagner’s music is as perfect as America is to many a good-humored American. They will tell you that never have horses neighed so realistically as they do in the “Walküre.” Answer that this is almost lowering music to the level of ventriloquism, and they will declare you a profane, unworthy to live. My Wagnerite friend told me last night that Wagner’s work constantly improved till it reached perfection in “Parsifal.” “There,” he said, quite seriously, “the music has reached such a state of perfection that, in the garden scene, you can smell the violets and the roses.”

“Well,” I interrupted, “I heard ‘Parsifal’ in Bayreuth, and I must confess that it is, perhaps, the only work of Wagner’s that I cannot understand.”

“I have heard it thirty-four times,” he said, “and enjoyed it more the thirty-fourth time than I did the thirty-third.”

“Then,” I remarked, “perhaps it has to be heard fifty times before it can be thoroughly appreciated. In which case, you must own that life is too short to enable one to see an opera fifty times in order to enjoy it as it should really be enjoyed. I don’t care what science there is about music, or what labors a musician should have to go through. As one of the public, I say that music is a recreation, and should be understood at once. Auber, for example, with his delightful airs, that three generations of men have sung on their way home from the opera house, has been a greater benefactor of the human race than Wagner. I prefer music written for the heart to music written for the mind.”

On hearing me mention Auber’s name in one breath with Wagner’s, the Wagnerite threw a glance of contempt at me that I shall never forget.

“Well,” said I, to regain his good graces, “I may improve yet – I will try again.”

As a rule, the Wagnerite is a man utterly destitute of humor.