From the Easy Chair, Volume 1Curtis, George William
General
From the Easy Chair, Volume 1
Curtis, George William
American essays
But Signor Raffaello da Perugia, who produces opera airs upon a
portable organ, with Don Whiskerando, who mounts with agility to the
parlor window to receive the consideration in his feathered cap, is he
not also a merchant who sells music to you in selected varieties, the
latest popular songs and tunes of the theatre, the waltz of last
year's ball-room? Must he be accounted a sturdy beggar because you
happen not to be in immediate want of his wares? Or the band of which
we were speaking, which arrives at the hour when the master of the
house returns from his office, and performs a serenade of welcome as
he greets the circle from which he has been absent since breakfast,
shall it be denied the pleasure of heightening the pleasure of others?
Are not the taxes of these Jem Baggses, these wandering minstrels, the
"only rates uninvidious in the levy, ungrudged in the assessment?"
Where the intent is so unequivocally kindly, is it not gross and
unfeeling to suggest in the modest orchestra a questionable chord, a
cracked reed, a cornet out of tune? Why so insistent, so scrupulously
exigent? Are you never out of tune, good sir? Your chords, say in the
domestic concert, are they always finely harmonious, and your own reed
never cracked? Why so eager to cast the first stone? Yonder trombone
may have its weaknesses--who of us, pray, is without? Has tolerance
gone out with astrology? "He had his faults," said the Reverend Bland
Sudds yesterday in a funeral discourse upon the Honorable Richard
Turpin--"he had his faults, yes, for he was human." But if a man may
falter, shall we not forgive to a trombone even a half-note? If Turpin
may be respectfully lamented with indulgent hope, shall a hesitating
horn be doomed to "the all-sweeping besom of societarian reformation?"
While Eugenio was making the grand tour he loitered in Venice and
lingered in Naples, wandering to Paestum, feasting in the orange
groves of Sorrento, and penetrating the Blue Grotto at Capri. In
Venice the songs of the country, in Naples the barcarolles, made his
memory as he came away a thicket of singing-birds. Those ever-renewed
snatches and remembered refrains of songs, Venetian and Neapolitan,
like a sponge passed over a Giorgione, brought out the mellow richness
of Italy, and as he paced Broadway and hummed a tender melody, he
walked where Vittoria Colonna had trod, and heard the faint beat of
oars upon moonlit Como. One morning, hard at work in his chamber,
where only the confused roar of the city was audible, a strain rose
high and clear above it all, with a soft, pathetic, penetrating
urgency, "So' marinaro di questa marina," and, all else forgotten, he
was once more rocking on Italian waters, and the red-capped
fisher-boys filled the air with song.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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