Witness our private galleries and the opera, but we say, like the parvenu in Emile Augier's delightful comedy LE GENDRE DE M.
POIRIER, "Patronize art? Of course! But the artists? Never!"And frankly, it would be too much, would it not, to expect a family only half a generation away from an iron foundry, or a mine, to be willing to receive Irving or Bernhardt on terms of perfect equality?
As it would be unjust to demand a mature mind in the overgrown boy, it is useless to hope for delicate tact and social feeling from the parvenu.To be gracious and at ease with all classes and professions, one must be perfectly sure of one's own position, and with us few feel this security, it being based on too frail a foundation, a crisis in the "street" going a long way towards destroying it.
Of course I am generalizing and doubt not that in many cultivated homes the right spirit exists, but unfortunately these are not the centres which give the tone to our "world." Lately at one of the most splendid houses in this city a young Italian tenor had been engaged to sing.When he had finished he stood alone, unnoticed, unspoken to for the rest of the evening.He had been paid to sing.