Читать книгу The World Does Move - Booth Tarkington - Страница 4

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YET never did an epoch more placidly believe itself the last word than did the fin de siècle—and every country newspaper glibly used that phrase, so sophisticated was our whole nation in those days. The fin de siècle was the last word in scientific achievement, in modern inventions, in literature and the fine arts, in good taste, in luxury, in elegance, in extravagance, in dress, in cleverness and in the art of being blasé. Civilization had gone about as far as possible; we had reached the summit of the peak and after us must come the decadence, which was, indeed, already setting in with Oscar Wilde’s writings and the strange drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. Thus the fin de siècle thought of itself when the thin young Midlander walked ashore from the Cortlandt Street ferryboat and went to live on the top floor of a brownstone-front boarding house with three friends who, like himself, were only a year or so out of college.

Of course, that brownstone-front, which had previously been the ample and pleasant residence of New Yorkers of some quality, no longer exists. Even now the neighbourhood is not wholly unfashionable, and a handsome, tall apartment house of inhospitable appearance stands upon the site—stands there temporarily, of course, for it will naturally be replaced before long by another one, taller, handsomer, and even more inhospitable. To live in an apartment in that street costs many thousands of dollars a year nowadays; but in those other days money was scarcer and more valuable. The “first-floor front” of our boarding house was occupied by a lady who paid forty dollars a week for her pleasant lodging and three excellent meals a day. Startled when we discovered this, we of the top floor thenceforth spoke of her as the Baroness Rothschild. We lived opulently ourselves, upon fifteen dollars a week, and had college friends in New York who made themselves comfortable enough, in agreeable neighbourhoods, for half as much.

When we went to the theatre we paid a dollar and a half for an orchestra seat; though when Sarah Bernhardt came over that winter the impressive charge for such a seat was three dollars. A silk hat cost seven dollars, and of course we all had silk hats and skirted coats for Sundays, “teas”, and afternoon calls. The best derby hats cost three, four, and even five dollars; soft hats were rare east of Kansas, except on farmers and politicians. There were table d’hôte dinners with wine for thirty-five cents at Italian restaurants; a dollar and a half paid for a Sunday evening table d’hôte, with music, under the great gas chandeliers of the best hotels in the town.

For it was still the age of gaslight, and how dark an American city of that period would appear to us if we could see it now as it was then after nightfall! Paris was the only Ville Lumière; but city of light as it was, its famous illumination of the ’Nineties did not light the clouds above it with half the glow of any lively American county seat after dark in 1928. Electric light was on the way; already sputtering white globes hung from long arms at the crossings of many American streets; but the lamplighter with his ladder would still be seen hurrying through the dusk for years to come. Theatres had begun to use electric lighting. Until then they had always smelled faintly and not unpleasantly of gas, for the footlights released a little before catching the flame, one from the other, and so did the upper lights over the stage and the invariable huge chandelier at the top of the house. The mildness of that light did not increase the eye repairing of oculists; and, moreover, the very craft of the actor did not suffer from it. Electric light made a lamentable change in that.

Of all our excursions from the boarding house top floor to the theatre, none was merrier than that to see Joseph Jefferson in The Rivals. Jefferson was an elderly man, but there was no elderliness in his “Bob Acres”. A fresh-coloured country youth came before us, inimitably the funniest young coward ever seen on the stage, and not until he played that part with increasingly fierce electric light glaring upon him was the illusion of youth dispelled. Maggie Mitchell, at sixty, played “Fanchon” in The Cricket, and what we saw was an elfish young girl; old men played “young parts”; there were youthful actors, who were specialists, playing “old parts”.

But nowadays the manager stares at an actor in the light of an office window and puts him on the stage to look—and usually to act—much as he does in that same illumination. Painters would feel that something had gone badly with art if old men’s portraits could be painted by old painters only and young painters were limited to the portraits of young sitters. And if the thing went further, limiting painters to portraits of themselves—which is not so far from what electric light and “realism” have done to the art of acting—portrait painting might seem to be on the way to become not an art at all.

But the passing of gaslight changed many things besides acting and lighting fixtures. The gas fixtures were not beautiful—heavy chandeliers of bronzed metal, “drop lights” with long green snakes of flexible tubing feeding gas to them, side lights that were merely iron pipes protruding from the walls—and usually the more ornamental these strove to be the uglier they were. Their passing made matches less a necessity, did away with the vases of spiral paper tapers rolled by frugal housewives, altered the plans of suicides and destroyed the most useful stock joke of the humorous weeklies and newspaper comedians.

This destroyed national joke was founded upon fact. It is not so easy to lay a gas pipe through the ground as to run a wire through the air, so there wasn’t much light on the farms and in the villages; all over the country the farmers and villagers used oil lamps and candles. Some collector of antiques may already possess an oblong of cardboard whereon, in heavy black letters, is printed, “Don’t Blow Out the Gas”; and it is curious to remember now that hotel-keepers usually displayed such a warning in every bedroom. For years the weekly and daily press humorists and draftsmen profited by a vast, continuous burlesquing of bucolic mishaps with city gas; and asphyxiation made into comedy was staple ware, too, for the vaudeville joker.

For the rustic sufferer himself, asphyxiation was as truly tragedy as was a fractured skull to the victim of a bicycle speeder; but the farmer had become too fixedly a stencil of urban humour to receive much sympathy. He was a bewhiskered backwoodsman and cheered another Roman holiday when all his savings were exchanged for a satchel confided to him by a well-dressed city stranger; our fin de siècle sophistication had only derision for him. It was otherwise with the unfortunates run down by the ruthless bicyclists; we became indignant for their sakes and sympathized with the constant editorials in the newspapers denouncing the speeders. For among other madnesses of the fin de siècle was the new speed mania.

But the bicycle craze was not quite yet at its maniacal maddest; all the world was not yet awheel, though most of the cities were passing ordinances forbidding the sidewalks to the wheelmen. School children were warned not to cross the streets without first looking carefully to see if bicycles were approaching from either direction; and out in the country the farmers were indignant because their chickens were in frequent danger on the roads, and because horses became hysterical and ran away at sight of the miraculous new vehicles.

What was most fin de siècle of all, however, scandalizing some communities, sending some into furies of argument and others into uproarious public laughter, was a sporadic revolutionary daring in bicycle costume. Here and there a violently modern woman or girl wore divided skirts for the new sport; these were to the ankles, though brazen enough, at that; but this was not the peak defiance of all the old conventionalities. In one or two cities women riders had been seen wearing no skirts at all. Instead, they wore heavy bloomers and gaiters; but of course they did not dare to appear in the more populous streets, and they rode rapidly. When such a rider whizzed by little children they were sometimes so dazed that she would be almost out of hearing before they began to yell.

Our boarding house in New York discussed these outbreaks of the New Woman as it discussed everything, and on the top floor our decision was that we were glad our sisters and the “girls we knew” felt as little sympathy as we did with such immodesties. We held long and vehement debates upon the question of Ruskin’s value to Art; but we had no argument over the wearers of bloomers and gaiters, for there we were unanimous.

It was the only subject upon which we were unanimous, I think; especially as the youngest of us was a law student and a willing debater, precociously adroit. The medical student and the young engineer, the other inhabitants of our heights, suffered themselves to be made into a plaintive and sometimes profane audience, while the law student for hour after hour used me roughly as a feebly opposing counsel. We fought over free trade, of course, and could not have imagined a time when that and “free silver” would not be the most vital of public questions; we fought interminably the battle between “realism” and “romanticism”; we wrangled long over young Stephen Crane’s indebtedness to Zola’s Débâcle for analysis of a soldier’s perceptions and feelings during battle, and we were increasingly in opposition concerning the beauty and value of classical music. But here the law student always became intolerantly authoritative; he was a patron of the opera, never missed a concert of the new Polish genius, Paderewski, and was so ardently and openly in love with Madame Melba, though he had not the pleasure of her acquaintance, that he caught a dangerous cold by standing for an hour in a blizzard to see her descend from her carriage at the door of her hotel. After that, the rest of us never dared challenge his opinion upon anything musical.