Ars Recte Vivendi | Page 8

conductor to arrest
the performance because he is irritated by a noise of whispering voices
or of slamming doors. "I saw you, Mr. Easy Chair," she said, "on the
evening of Rachel's first performance in this country. What would you
have thought if she had stopped short in the play--it was Corneille's Les
Horaces, you remember--because she was annoyed by the rustling of
the leaves of a thousand books of the play which the audience turned

over at the same moment?"
The Easy Chair declined to step into the snare which was plainly set in
its sight. It would not accept an illustration as an argument. The
enjoyment at a concert, it contended, for which the audience has paid in
advance, and to which it is entitled, depends upon conditions of silence
and order which it can not itself maintain without serious disturbance.
It may indeed cry "Hush!" and "Put him out!" but not only would that
cry be of doubtful effect, but experience proves that a concert audience
will not raise it. If the audience were left to itself, it would permit late
arrivals, and all the disturbance of chatter and movement. To twist the
line of Goldsmith, those who came to pray would be at the mercy of
those who came to scoff; and such mercy is merciless. The conductor
stands in loco parentis. He is the advocatus angeli. He does for the
audience what it would not do for itself. He protects it against its own
fatal good-nature. He insists that it shall receive what it has paid for,
and he will deal with disturbers as they deserve. The audience,
conscious of its own good-humored impotence, recognizes at once its
protector, and gladly applauds him for doing for it what it has not the
nerve to do for itself. No audience whose rights were defended as
Thomas defended those of his Washington audience ever resented the
defence.
"No," responded Cleopatra, briskly; "the same imbecility prevents."
"Very well; then such an audience plainly needs a strong and resolute
leadership; and that is precisely what Thomas supplied. A crowd is
always grateful to the man who will do what everybody in the crowd
feels ought to be done, but what no individual is quite ready to
undertake."
When Cleopatra said that an audience is quite competent to take care of
itself, her remark was natural, for she instinctively conceived the
audience as herself extended into a thousand persons. Such an audience
would certainly be capable of dispensing with any mentor or guide. But
when the Easy Chair asked her if she was annoyed by the chattering
interruption which Thomas rebuked, she replied that of course she was
annoyed. Yet when she was further asked if she cried "Hush!" or
resorted to any means whatever to quell the disturbance, the royal lady
could not help smiling as she answered, "I did not," and the Easy Chair
retorted, "Yet an audience is capable of protecting itself!"

Meanwhile, whatever the conductor or the audience may or may not do,
nothing is more vulgar than audible conversation, or any other kind of
disturbance, during a concert. Sometimes it may be mere
thoughtlessness; sometimes boorishness, the want of the fine instinct
which avoids occasioning any annoyance; but usually it is due to a
desire to attract attention and to affect superiority to the common
interest. It is, indeed, mere coarse ostentation, like wearing diamonds at
a hotel table or a purple velvet train in the street. If the audience had the
courage which Cleopatra attributed to it, that part which was annoyed
by the barbarians who chatter and disturb would at once suppress the
annoyance by an emphatic and unmistakable hiss. If this were the
practice in public assemblies, such incidents as that at the Washington
concert would be unknown. Until it is the practice, even were
Cleopatra's self the offender, every self-respecting conductor who has a
proper sense of his duties to the audience will do with its sincere
approval what Mr. Thomas did.
(April, 1883)

WOMAN'S DRESS
The American who sits in a street omnibus or railroad-car and sees a
young woman whose waist is pinched to a point that makes her
breathing mere panting and puffing, and whose feet are squeezed into
shoes with a high heel in the middle of the sole, which compels her to
stump and hobble as she tries to walk, should be very wary of praising
the superiority of European and American civilization to that of the
East. The grade of civilization which squeezes a waist into deformity is
not, in that respect at least, superior to that which squeezes a foot into
deformity. It is in both instances a barbarous conception alike of beauty
and of the function of woman. The squeezed waist and the squeezed