Facial Justice (17 page)

Chapter Twenty-three

"THE programs were different, except for the interesting experiment that each pianist played the _Moonlight Sonata__. It was therefore possible to compare their respective styles and general status as performers. It would have been possible to do this in any case--perhaps impossible not to--but the juxtaposition gave point to the contrast. "The _Moonlight Sonata__ is a popular work but it is also classical--that is to say, above the heads of some members of the audience. At the moment I will make no comment upon this, except to say that the jazz section at the end (the rest of the program was classical), which all could enjoy, came as a welcome relief. Classical music has, of course, long been tolerated by listeners who might be called underprivileged in the higher reaches of musical knowledge; even those who are unfortunate enough to have no ear for music have seldom openly resented it--much as they must have suffered from boredom and even from active irritation under the meaningless blare of sound. Not enough sympathy has been shown with a section of the public which has suffered more than most from the priggishness and fancied superiority of the Failed Alpha class, in whom the cult for 'serious' music has always been strongest. How can music be 'serious? Seriousness consists, and consists only, in the effort to realize the theme song or signature tune which heralds the pronouncements of our darling Dictator (blessed be his name). 'Every Valley' must be exalted, every mountain and hill brought low; and how can this aim be achieved if the category 'serious' is allowed to include any other activity of the human mind and body? Games perhaps; in games the antisocial instinct to excel is slightly counterbalanced by the fact that some are born with bodies stronger or more agile than others. Of those whom this superiority has raised to the pure Alpha class we do not speak; the Dictator in his infinite and inscrutable wisdom has decided that they should form a _corps d' élite__, a chosen and choice body with whom we should never dream of comparing ourselves. They are indeed the standard of our littleness, a littleness we embrace all the more eagerly because it absolves us from any effort, except the effort to be little, an effort that is becoming less with every day that passes. But we should not embrace it so willingly if it contained within itself gradations and degrees which enabled some to boast that they were not so little as others. We must be level in littleness and equal in insignificance, or what are we here for? And if I may presume to read the Dictator's mind, I should hazard the conjecture that he does not view with favor the bodily advantages that one man, and, still more, that one woman, has over another. I say one woman, because it is no secret that the Dictator, with unerring insight confirmed by the latest psychological research, has decided that women are better subjects for complete equalization than men. The virus of individuality is much less strong in them; by nature they differ from each other only in inessentials, in such minor matters as figure, voice, capacity for affection, etc. Their natural coloring, it has been well said, is protective coloring, and though some of the more ill-advised among them have often striven, and still strive, to assume a false individuality by divergencies of dress, they are at bottom _all alike__, and will be happier, as well as more useful, when they realize that this is so. Let us permit ourselves to hope that the Dictator, who has done so much for them by regularizing their faces (for it's oh to be a Beta, when a Gamma's near), will proceed to regularize their bodies, which are a source of Bad E, just as their faces were; and even endow them with a common mind, pitched, let us hope, at no exalted level. And if it is discovered that the same beneficent process can be applied to men, without too much interference with their naturally more individualistic cast of body and mind (the Dictator does not wish any of us, least of all a man, to suffer), well, so much the better. Instead of sports at which this or that man _wins__, stirring up, it has to be admitted, a faint whiff of Bad E in his 'rivals' or 'competitors' (to use words which, some of us dare to hope, will soon vanish from the language), we shall have sports at which all the entrants win, or lose. And those two words, which have occasioned so much needless heart-burning in the past, will become indistinguishable and so lose their sting. For what does Good E signify, so long as any man, on whatever pretext of superiority, innate or acquired, can boast himself above the others? In the case of women, our minds already revolt from such a disturbing and reactionary thought. "This is by the way, and a wistful and wishful vision of the future, inspired by a presumptuous effort to imagine what may be in the Dictator's mind. It may be totally mistaken. But we know that he is all for fairness, and more power to his elbow. "But to return to classical, or 'serious' music. In so far as the so-called appreciation of it results in distinguishing one man (or indeed one woman, though they hardly count) from another, it is retrograde. If this be heresy, I cannot help it. As a student of music, I have to admit that I did once understand to a small degree and even enjoy classical music: the climate of thought at the time made this possible and some thought even desirable. But now things have changed and it seems priggish and superior to enjoy what the majority, or even a minority, are by some congenital deficiency, or accidental lack of training, debarred from enjoying. We experience the same kind of discomfort, akin to shame, that a person in perfect health feels in the presence of someone physically or mentally less well off than himself. In this connection I need hardly remind you of a growing feeling, amounting almost to resentment, among the physically handicapped and underprivileged against those who go about too obviously enjoying their good health. Far be it from me to offer suggestions to a regime which has brought us all so much happiness; but since the Dictator, in his infinite mercy, has said that such suggestions are acceptable, may I most humbly propose that an effective way of eliminating Bad E (which is always breaking out in new places) would be to inject the healthy with some form of not necessarily serious illness, so that the level of physical and mental well-being in the New State should be roughly regularized--no one too ill, no one too well? Thus the healthy could no longer swank about it, nor those with unfair physical handicaps have to endure the mortification of seeing others fitter than themselves. "Again I wander from my subject, but it was only to assure my readers that in writing about so-called classical music I am uncomfortably aware of a certain intellectual priggishness, and it is a positive relief to me to feel that many of my comments, if not all, would almost certainly be regarded by musicians of the old school (a supercilious set) as hopelessly wide of the mark. For how it warms the heart to know that one is erring with the majority, sharing their collective mistakes, and adding to the blessed _nualage__ of misinformation that holds us all together! "By the old standards Brutus 91's rendering of the _Moonlight Sonato__ would have been highly praised. His technical proficiency was admirable: he scarcely played a wrong note. He realized to the full the intention of the slow movement, which lulls the listener into a sense of false security, though a hint of coming storm is never quite silenced. He entered fully into the delicious gaiety of the scherzo, which Liszt called _une fleur entre deux abîmes__ (please pardon this parade of un-general knowledge). He remembered the important direction to attack it at once; and when he came to the last movement, he surmounted its technical difficulties with so much ease that one was only conscious of the storm in the composer's mind and never of the trouble to the fingers of the executant. Those wild rushes up the piano over which we used to stumble were rendered effortlessly. The passion was like the passion of a thunderstorm; we did not ask ourselves by what technical means the heavens produced this soul-shaking uproar, where the electricity came from, and the thunderclaps; we were content to listen and admire. The audience, many of whom were experiencing for the first time emotions they could never have experienced for themselves, sat spellbound, and then, after a breathless interval, the applause broke out. Brutus was recalled many times and at last induced to give an encore--a _Moment Musical__ of Schubert's, which again brought down the house. "These were the final items on Brutus' program; I will not describe the others, though by old-time standards they were equally well played. After the interval, Cassius 92 took Brutus' place at the piano. "From the first note he struck it was clear that he was not Brutus' equal as a pianist, and by not equal I mean he was inferior. He used the pedal far too much, especially in difficult or fast passages, thereby blurring the sound; his touch was heavy and rigid, and he played a great many wrong notes. He galumphed his way through Chopin's _Ballade in A Flat__, making the delicate, dancing music sound like a stampede of elephants. Nor did he seem to know what the music was about or in what mood the composer had written it; he approached each piece as if it was a task that will power alone would get him through. It seemed rather cruel to put him on the same platform with Brutus, and I wondered who was responsible for such an ill-judged juxtaposition. Surely the Dictator--blessed be his name--who (I say with all respect) is rumored to have a hand in everything, could not have had a hand in this... this painful exhibition of one man's superiority to another. I mean, of course, superiority in the pianistric art; in all other respects, I am sure, Brutus was exactly Cassius' equal. As men, as patients and delinquents, not a pin to choose between them. The audience was puzzled, too; fair-minded as they must be and are, they began by giving Cassius exactly the same amount of applause, not a handclap more or less, than they had given Brutus. It was a splendid exhibition of fairness, the way they rewarded both men equally, as if their merits had been just the same. But after the third piece, in which, I must say, the unintentional discords had been very notice-able and the pianist, who was playing without his notes, lost his way and left out sixteen bars, the volume of applause fell off considerably and there were murmurs and shufflings. At this the pianist seemed to lose his nerve, for he left the plat-form abruptly and returned carrying rather sheepishly the mu-sic of his final piece, which was to be the _Moonlight Sonata__. "At first I felt sorry for him and, I must confess, a little angry with him, he was making such a mess of it. He played the 'andante' rather fast and with continuous use, which the composer expressly deprecates, of the soft pedal. He played the scherzo slower, and the presto, it seemed, slower still, and even so with a plentiful sprinkling of wrong notes. Instead of a whirlwind rush, laborious arpeggios climbed up the piano, like an unskillful workman going up a ladder, and the repeated chord of the climax was as often as not miss-hit. Of agitation there was plenty, but it was the nervous agitation of the bungler, not the headlong sweep of passion. The audience grew more restive, and even the Beta faces, as a rule so magnificently impassive, were ruffled by disapproval. And when the air made its first entrance, the pianist's left hand lost liaison with his right, with the result that at least an extra bar was added to the proper number. At this the audience made a low sound not unlike a groan, and I was inclined to join in, when suddenly a thought struck me that changed my mind and my whole outlook. "If I had been called on to play the _Moonlight Sonata__, this was the way I should have played it--indeed I might even have played it worse: so who was I to demand that Cassius 92 should play it better than I could, or the audience either, few of whom, I suspected, in spite of their ungenerous attitude, could have bettered his performance? By playing it 'badly' (advisedly I put the word in inverted commas) he was only playing it as _we__ should have played it--those of us who could play. By playing it 'badly' he was keeping us in countenance--a gracious act not so important for us Betas, but an inestimable boon to the male part of the audience, whose faces had begun to work alarmingly. 'Betafy them! Betafy them!' I mutely cried (but that is for the Dictator to decide), 'reveal to them that this performance, in spite of its faults, indeed _because__ of its faults, is worth far more than the other, because it is in line with our common humanity: we all have faults, we all make mistakes. Brutus, by the very faultlessness of his rendering has put us out of countenance, he has made us look up to him, which we should never do, to anything or anyone, except, of course, the Inspectors and the Dictator! By taking up a superior position he has made us guilty of Bad E--yes, I could feel its poison stealing into me, destroying my sense of unity with my fellows. Cassius is one of us because he made mistakes, just as we should. What right has Brutus 91 to play more correctly than we can, to humiliate us? It isn't fair, it isn't! And almost simultaneously I had another revelation: that it was the object of whoever planned the program (could it, could it have been the Dictator himself?) to teach us a lesson in humility, to keep us in our proper places, and prevent us trying to outshine our fellows by an exhibition of our so-called superior powers. "After that it was the mistakes and the worst-played passages that pleased me the most, for I felt in them the strongest evidence of our common humanity--that is, our liability to err, and my resentment grew against Brutus and the flawless performance by which he had separated himself from us on his pinnacle of excellence. Crash! Bang! With each deviation from the music my heart rejoiced, for this, I knew, was the way I should have played it myself; and I felt that more and more I was entering into the mind of the Dictator, who has never wanted us to do anything well, for well is our highest common factor, which excludes the many who fall by the way whereas 'badly' is the lowest common denominator, and includes us all. Darling Dictator, blessed be his name, who does not require of us more than we can give, more than the least of us can give! Long may he live to make the New State safe for mediocrity! "And the excitement of these thoughts was still seething in my head when the _Sonata__ came to an end and the pianist rose shakily to make his bow. At that a storm of boos,