in a purely
aesthetic fashion--which is seldom possible save when he is in
liquor--or confesses frankly that he doesn't like them at all; whereas
the visiting Americano is so powerfully shocked and fascinated by them
that one finds him, the same evening, in places where no respectable man
ought to go. All art, to this fellow, must have a certain bawdiness, or
he cannot abide it. His favorite soprano, in the opera house, is not the
fat and middle-aged lady who can actually sing, but the girl with the
bare back and translucent drawers. Condescending to the concert hall,
he is bored by the posse of enemy aliens in funereal black, and so
demands a vocal soloist--that is, a gaudy creature of such advanced
corsetting that she can make him forget Bach for a while, and turn his
thoughts pleasantly to amorous intrigue.

In all this, of course, there is nothing new. Other and better men have
noted the damage that the personal equation does to music, and some of
them have even sought ways out. For example, Richard Strauss. His
so-called ballet, "Josefs Legend," produced in Paris just before the
war, is an attempt to write an opera without singers. All of the music
is in the orchestra; the folks on the stage merely go through a
pointless pantomime; their main function is to entertain the eye with
shifting colors. Thus, the romantic sentiments of Joseph are announced,
not by some eye-rolling tenor, but by the first, second, third, fourth,
fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth violins (it is a Strauss score!), with
the incidental aid of the wood-wind, the brass, the percussion and the
rest of the strings. And the heroine's reply is made, not by a soprano
with a cold, but by an honest man playing a flute. The next step will be
the substitution of marionettes for actors. The removal of the orchestra
to a sort of trench, out of sight of the audience, is already an
accomplished fact at Munich. The end, perhaps, will be music purged of
its current ptomaines. In brief, music.

XXXVI

ZOOS

I often wonder how much sound and nourishing food is fed to the animals
in the zoological gardens of America every week, and try to figure out
what the public gets in return for the cost thereof. The annual bill
must surely run into millions; one is constantly hearing how much beef a
lion downs at a meal, and how many tons of hay an elephant dispatches in
a month. And to what end? To the end, principally, that a horde of
superintendents and keepe