CHAPTER VIII.
LETTER FROM ISAURA CICOGNA TO MADAME DE GRANTMESNIL.
VILLA D'-----, A------.
I can never express to you, my beloved Eulalie, the strange charm which a
letter from you throws over my poor little lonely world for days after it
is received. There is always in it something that comforts, something
that sustains, but also a something that troubles and disquiets me. I
suppose Goethe is right, "that it is the property of true genius to
disturb all settled ideas," in order, no doubt, to lift them into a
higher level when they settle down again.
Your sketch of the new work you are meditating amid the orange groves of
Provence interests me intensely; yet, do you forgive me when I add that
the interest is not without terror? I do not find myself able to
comprehend how, amid those lovely scenes of Nature, your mind voluntarily
surrounds itself with images of pain and discord. I stand in awe of the
calm with which you subject to your analysis the infirmities of reason
and the tumults of passion. And all those laws of the social state which
seem to me so fixed and immovable you treat with so quiet a scorn, as if
they were but the gossamer threads which a touch of your slight woman's
hand could brush away. But I cannot venture to discuss such subjects
with you. It is only the skilled enchanter who can stand safely in the
magic circle, and compel the spirits that he summons, even if they are
evil, to minister to ends in which he foresees a good.
We continue to live here very quietly, and I do not as yet feel the worse
for the colder climate. Indeed, my wonderful doctor, who was recommended
to me as American, but is in reality English, assures me that a single
winter spent here under his care will suffice for my complete
re-establishment. Yet that career, to the training for which so many
years have been devoted, does not seem to me so alluring as it once did.
I have much to say on this subject, which I defer till I can better
collect my own thoughts on it; at present they are confused and
struggling. The great Maestro has been most gracious.
In what a radiant atmosphere his genius lives and breathes! Even in his
cynical moods, his very cynicism has in it the ring of a jocund music,--
the laugh of Figaro, not of Mephistopheles.
We went to dine with him last week. He invited to meet us Madame S-----,
who has this year conquered all opposition, and reigns alone, the great
S-----; Mr. T--------, a pianist of admirable promise; your friend
M. Savarin, wit, critic, and poet, with his pleasant, sensible wife;
and a few others, who, the Maestro confided to me in a whisper, were
authorities in the press. After dinner S----- sang to us, magnificently,
of course. Then she herself graciously turned to me, said how much she
had heard from the Maestro in my praise, and so and so. I was persuaded
to sing after her. I need not say to what disadvantage. But I forgot my
nervousness; I forgot my audience; I forgot myself, as I always do when
once my soul, as it were, finds wing in music, and buoys itself in the
air, relieved from the sense of earth. I knew not that I had succeeded
till I came to a close, and then my eyes resting on the face of the grand
prima donna, I was seized with an indescribable sadness, with a keen pang
of remorse. Perfect artiste though she be, and with powers in her own
realm of art which admit of no living equal, I saw at once that I had
pained her: she had grown almost livid; her lips were quivering, and it
was only with a great effort that she muttered out some faint words
intended for applause. I comprehended by an instinct how gradually there
can grow upon the mind of an artist the most generous that jealousy which
makes the fear of a rival annihilate the delight in art. If ever I
should achieve S-----'s fame as a singer, should I feel the same.
jealousy?--I think not now, but I have not been tested. She went away
abruptly. I spare you the recital of the compliments paid to me by my
other auditors, compliments that gave me no pleasure; for on all lips,
except those of the Maestro, they implied, as the height of eulogy, that
I had inflicted torture upon S-----. "If so," said he, "she would be as
foolish as a rose that was jealous of the whiteness of a lily. You would
do yourself great wrong, my child, if you tried to vie with the rose in
its own colour."
He patted my bended head as he spoke, with that kind of fatherly
king-like fondness with which he honours me; and I took his hand in mine,
and kissed it gratefully. "Nevertheless," said Savarin, "when the lily
comes out there will be a furious attack on it, made by the clique that
devotes itself to the rose: a lily clique will be formed en revanche, and
I foresee a fierce paper war. Do not be frightened at its first
outburst: every fame worth having must be fought for."
Is it so? have you had to fight for your fame, Eulalie? and do you hate
all contests as much as I do?
Our only other gayety since I last wrote was a soiree at M. Louvier's.
That republican millionaire was not slow in attending to the kind letter
you addressed to him recommending us to his civilities. He called at
once, placed his good offices at our disposal, took charge of my modest
fortune, which he has invested, no doubt, as safely as it is
advantageously in point of interest, hired our carriage for us, and in
short has been most amiably useful.
At his house we met many to me most pleasant, for they spoke with such
genuine appreciation of your works and yourself. But there were others
whom I should never have expected to meet under the roof of a Croesus who
has so great a stake in the order of things established. One young man--
a noble whom he specially presented to me, as a politician who would be
at the head of affairs when the Red Republic was established--asked me
whether I did not agree with him that all private property was public
spoliation, and that the great enemy to civilization was religion, no
matter in what form.
He addressed to me these tremendous questions with an effeminate lisp,
and harangued on them with small feeble gesticulations of pale dirty
fingers covered with rings.
I asked him if there were many who in France shared his ideas.
"Quite enough to carry them some day," he answered with a lofty smile.
"And the day may be nearer than the world thinks, when my confreres will
be so numerous that they will have to shoot down each other for the sake
of cheese to their bread."
That day nearer than the world thinks! Certainly, so far as one may
judge the outward signs of the world at Paris, it does not think of such
things at all. With what an air of self-content the beautiful city
parades her riches! Who can gaze on her splendid palaces, her gorgeous
shops, and believe that she will give ear to doctrines that would
annihilate private rights of property; or who can enter her crowded
churches, and dream that she can ever again install a republic too
civilized for religion?
Adieu. Excuse me for this dull letter. If I have written on much that
has little interest even for me, it is that I wish to distract my mind
from brooding over the question that interests me most, and on which I
most need your counsel. I will try to approach it in my next.
ISAURA.
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.
Eulalie, Eulalie!--What mocking spirit has been permitted in this modern
age of ours to place in the heart of woman the ambition which is the
prerogative of men? You indeed, so richly endowed with a man's genius,
have a right to man's aspirations. But what can justify such ambition in
me? Nothing but this one unintellectual perishable gift of a voice that
does but please in uttering the thoughts of others. Doubtless I could
make a name familiar for its brief time to the talk of Europe,--a name,
what name? a singer's name. Once I thought that name a glory. Shall I
ever forget the day when you first shone upon me; when, emerging from
childhood as from a dim and solitary bypath, I stood forlorn on the great
thoroughfare of life, and all the prospects before me stretched sad in
mists and in rain? You beamed on me then as the sun coming out from the
cloud and changing the face of earth; you opened to my sight the fairy-
land of poetry and art; you took me by the hand and said, "Courage!
there is at each step some green gap in the hedgerows, some, soft escape
from the stony thoroughfare. Beside the real life expands the ideal life
to those who seek it. Droop not, seek it: the ideal life has its
sorrows, but it never admits despair; as on the ear of him who follows
the winding course of a stream, the stream ever varies the note of its
music,--now loud with the rush of the falls; now low and calm as it
glides by the level marge of smooth banks; now sighing through the stir
of the reeds; now babbling with a fretful joy as some sudden curve on the
shore stays its flight among gleaming pebbles,--so to the soul of the
artist is the voice of the art ever fleeting beside and before him.
Nature gave thee the bird's gift of song: raise the gift into art, and
make the art thy companion.
"Art and Hope were twin-born, and they die together." See how faithfully
I remember, methinks, your very words. But the magic of the words, which
I then but dimly understood, was in your smile and in your eye, and the
queen-like wave of your hand as if beckoning to a world which lay before
you, visible and familiar as your native land. And how devotedly, with
what earnestness of passion, I gave myself up to the task of raising my
gift into an art! I thought of nothing else, dreamed of nothing else;
and oh, now sweet to me then were words of praise! "Another year yet,"
at length said the masters, "and you ascend your throne among the queens
of song." Then--then--I would have changed for no other throne on earth
my hope of that to be achieved in the realms of my art. And then came
that long fever: my strength broke down, and the Maestro said, "Rest, or
your voice is gone, and your throne is lost forever." How hateful that
rest seemed to me! You again came to my aid. You said, "The time you
think lost should be but time improved. Penetrate your mind with other
songs than the trash of Libretti. The more you habituate yourself to the
forms, the more you imbue yourself with the spirit, in which passions
have been expressed and character delineated by great writers, the more
completely you will accomplish yourself in your own special art of singer
and actress." So, then, you allured me to a new study. Ah! in so doing
did you dream that you diverted me from the old ambition? My knowledge
of French and Italian, and my rearing in childhood, which had made
English familiar to me, gave me the keys to the treasure-houses of three
languages. Naturally I began with that in which your masterpieces are
composed. Till then I had not even read your works. They were the first
I chose. How they impressed, how they startled me! what depths in the
mind of man, in the heart of woman, they revealed to me! But I owned to
you then, and I repeat it now, neither they nor any of the works in
romance and poetry which form the boast of recent French literature
satisfied yearnings for that calm sense of beauty, that divine joy in a
world beyond this world, which you had led me to believe it was the
prerogative of ideal art to bestow. And when I told you this with the
rude frankness you had bid me exercise in talk with you, a thoughtful,
melancholy shade fell over your face, and you said quietly, "You are
right, child; we, the French of our time, are the offspring of
revolutions that settled nothing, unsettled all: we resemble those
troubled States which rush into war abroad in order to re-establish peace
at home. Our books suggest problems to men for reconstructing some
social system in which the calm that belongs to art may be found at last:
but such books should not be in your hands; they are not for the
innocence and youth of women as yet unchanged by the systems which
exist." And the next day you brought me 'l'asso's great poem, the
"Gerusalemme Liberata," and said, smiling, "Art in its calm is here."
You remember that I was then at Sorrento by the order of my physician.
Never shall I forget the soft autumn day when I sat amongst the lonely
rocklets to the left of the town,--the sea before me, with scarce a
ripple; my very heart steeped in the melodies of that poem, so marvellous
for a strength disguised in sweetness, and for a symmetry in which each
proportion blends into the other with the perfectness of a Grecian
statue. The whole place seemed to me filled with the presence of the
poet to whom it had given birth. Certainly the reading of that poem
formed an era in my existence: to this day I cannot acknowledge the
faults or weaknesses which your criticisms pointed out; I believe because
they are in unison with my own nature, which yearns for harmony, and,
finding that, rests contented. I shrink from violent contrasts, and can
discover nothing tame and insipid in a continuance of sweetness and
serenity. But it was not till after I had read "La Gerusalemme" again
and again, and then sat and brooded over it, that I recognized the main
charm of the poem in the religion which clings to it as the perfume
clings to a flower,--a religion sometimes melancholy, but never to me
sad. Hope always pervades it. Surely if, as you said, "Hope is twin-
born with art," it is because art at its highest blends itself
unconsciously with religion, and proclaims its affinity with hope by its
faith in some future good more perfect than it has realized in the past.
Be this as it may, it was in this poem so pre-eminently Christian that I
found the something which I missed and craved for in modern French
masterpieces; even yours,--a something spiritual, speaking to my own
soul, calling it forth; distinguishing it as an essence apart from mere
human reason; soothing, even when it excited; making earth nearer to
heaven. And when I ran on in this strain to you after my own wild
fashion, you took my head between your hands and kissed me, and said,
"Happy are those who believe! long may that happiness be thine!" Why did
I not feel in Dante the Christian charm that I felt in Tasso? Dante in
your eyes, as in those of most judges, is infinitely the greater genius;
but reflected on the dark stream of that genius the stars are so
troubled, the heaven so threatening.
Just as my year of holiday was expiring, I turned to English literature;
and Shakspeare, of course, was the first English poet put into my hands.
It proves how childlike my mind still was, that my earliest sensation in
reading him was that of disappointment. It was not only that, despite my
familiarity with English (thanks chiefly to the care of him whom I call
my second father), there is much in the metaphorical diction of
Shakspeare which I failed to comprehend; but he seemed to me so far like
the modern French writers who affect to have found inspiration in his
muse, that he obtrudes images of pain and suffering without cause or
motive sufficiently clear to ordinary understandings, as I had taught
myself to think it ought to be in the drama.
He makes Fate so cruel that we lose sight of the mild deity behind her.
Compare, in this, Corneille's "Polyeucte," with the "Hamlet." In the
first an equal calamity befalls the good, but in their calamity they are
blessed. The death of the martyr is the triumph of his creed. But when
we have put down the English tragedy,--when Hamlet and Ophelia are
confounded in death with Polonius and the fratricidal king, we see not
what good end for humanity is achieved. The passages that fasten on our
memory do not make us happier and holier: they suggest but terrible
problems, to which they give us no solution.
In the "Horaces" of Corneille there are fierce contests, rude passions,
tears drawn from some of the bitterest sources of human pity; but then
through all stands out, large and visible to the eyes of all spectators,
the great ideal of devoted patriotism. How much of all that has been
grandest in the life of France, redeeming even its worst crimes of
revolution in the love of country, has had its origin in the "Horaces" of
Corneille. But I doubt if the fates of Coriolanus and Caesar and Brutus
and Antony, in the giant tragedies of Shakspeare, have made Englishmen
more willing to die for England. In fine, it was long before--I will not
say I understood or rightly appreciated Shakspeare, for no Englishman
would admit that I or even you could ever do so, but before I could
recognize the justice of the place his country claims for him as the
genius without an equal in the literature of Europe. Meanwhile the
ardour I had put into study, and the wear and tear of the emotions which
the study called forth, made themselves felt in a return of my former
illness, with symptoms still more alarming; and when the year was out I
was ordained to rest for perhaps another year before I could sing in
public, still less appear on the stage. How I rejoiced when I heard that
fiat! for I emerged from that year of study with a heart utterly
estranged from the profession in which I had centred my hopes before--
Yes, Eulalie, you had bid me accomplish myself for the arts of utterance;
by the study of arts in which thoughts originate the words they employ;
and in doing so I had changed myself into another being. I was forbidden
all fatigue of mind: my books were banished, but not the new self which
the books had formed. Recovering slowly through the summer, I came
hither two months since, ostensibly for the advice of Dr. C-------, but
really in the desire to commune with my own heart and be still.
And now I have poured forth that heart to you, would you persuade me
still to be a singer? If you do, remember at least how jealous and
absorbing the art of the singer and the actress is,--how completely I
must surrender myself to it, and live among books or among dreams no
more. Can I be anything else but singer? and if not, should I be
contented merely to read and to dream?
I must confide to you one ambition which during the lazy Italian summer
took possession of me; I must tell you the ambition, and add that I have
renounced it as a vain one. I had hoped that I could compose, I mean in
music. I was pleased with some things I did: they expressed in music
what I could not express in words; and one secret object in coming here
was to submit them to the great Maestro. He listened to them patiently:
he complimented me on my accuracy in the mechanical laws of composition;
he even said that my favourite airs were "touchants et gracieux."
And so he would have left me, but I stopped him timidly, and said, "Tell
me frankly, do you think that with time and study I could compose music
such as singers equal to myself would sing to?"
"You mean as a professional composer?"
"Well, yes."
"And to the abandonment of your vocation as a singer?"
"Yes."
"My dear child, I should be your worst enemy if I encouraged such a
notion: cling to the career in which you call be greatest; gain but
health, and I wager my reputation on your glorious success on the stage.
What can you be as a composer? You will set pretty music to pretty
words, and will be sung in drawing-rooms with the fame a little more or
less that generally attends the compositions of female amateurs. Aim at
something higher, as I know you would do, and you will not succeed. Is
there any instance in modern times, perhaps in any times, of a female
composer who attains even to the eminence of a third-rate opera-writer?
Composition in letters may be of no sex. In that Madame Dudevant and
your friend Madame de Grantmesnil can beat most men; but the genius of
musical composition is _homme_, and accept it as a compliment when I say
that you are essentially _femme_."
He left me, of course, mortified and humbled; but I feel he is right as
regards myself, though whether in his depreciation of our whole sex I
cannot say. But as this hope has left me, I have become more disquieted,
still more restless. Counsel me, Eulalie; counsel, and, if possible,
comfort me.
ISAURA.
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.
No letter from you yet, and I have left you in peace for ten days. How
do you think I have spent them? The Maestro called on us with
M. Savarin, to insist on our accompanying them on a round of the
theatres. I had not been to one since my arrival. I divined that the
kind-hearted composer had a motive in this invitation. He thought that
in witnessing the applauses bestowed on actors, and sharing in the
fascination in which theatrical illusion holds an audience, my old
passion for the stage, and with it the longing for an artiste's fame,
would revive.
In my heart I wished that his expectations might be realized. Well for
me if I could once more concentrate all my aspirations on a prize within
my reach!
We went first to see a comedy greatly in vogue, and the author thoroughly
understands the French stage of our day. The acting was excellent in its
way. The next night we went to the Odeon, a romantic melodrama in six
acts, and I know not how many tableaux. I found no fault with the acting
there. I do not give you the rest of our programme. We visited all the
principal theatres, reserving the opera and Madame S------ for the last.
Before I speak of the opera, let me say a word or two on the plays.
There is no country in which the theatre has so great a hold on the
public as in France; no country in which the successful dramatist has so
high a fame; no country perhaps in which the state of the stage so
faithfully represents the moral and intellectual condition of the people.
I say this not, of course, from my experience of countries which I have
not visited, but from all I hear of the stage in Germany and in England.
The impression left on my mind by the performances I witnessed is, that
the French people are becoming dwarfed. The comedies that please them
are but pleasant caricatures of petty sections in a corrupt society.
They contain no large types of human nature; their witticisms convey no
luminous flashes of truth; their sentiment is not pure and noble,--it is
a sickly and false perversion of the impure and ignoble into travesties
of the pure and noble.
Their melodramas cannot be classed as literature: all that really remains
of the old French genius is its vaudeville. Great dramatists create
great parts. One great part, such as a Rachel would gladly have
accepted, I have not seen in the dramas of the young generation.
High art has taken refuge in the opera; but that is not French opera.
I do not complain so much that French taste is less refined. I complain
that French intellect is lowered. The descent from "Polyeucte" to "Ruy
Blas" is great, not so much in the poetry of form as in the elevation of
thought; but the descent from "Ruy Blas" to the best drama now produced
is out of poetry altogether, and into those flats of prose which give not
even the glimpse of a mountain-top.
But now to the opera. S------ in Norma! The house was crowded, and its
enthusiasm as loud as it was genuine. You tell me that S------ never
rivalled Pasta, but certainly her Norma is a great performance. Her
voice has lost less of its freshness than I had been told, and what is
lost of it her practised management conceals or carries off.
The Maestro was quite right: I could never vie with her in her own line;
but conceited and vain as I may seem even to you in saying so, I feel in
my own line that I could command as large an applause,--of course taking
into account my brief-lived advantage of youth. Her acting, apart from
her voice, does not please me. It seems to me to want intelligence of
the subtler feelings, the under-current of emotion which constitutes the
chief beauty of the situation and the character. Am I jealous when I say
this? Read on and judge.
On our return that night, when I had seen the Venosta to bed, I went into
my own room, opened the window, and looked out. A lovely night, mild as
in spring at Florence,--the moon at her full, and the stars looking so
calm and so high beyond our reach of their tranquillity. The evergreens
in the gardens of the villas around me silvered over, and the summer
boughs, not yet clothed with leaves, were scarcely visible amid the
changeless smile of the laurels. At the distance lay Paris, only to be
known by its innumerable lights. And then I said to myself,
"No, I cannot be an actress; I cannot resign my real self for that
vamped-up hypocrite before the lamps. Out on those stage-robes and
painted cheeks! Out on that simulated utterance of sentiments learned by
rote and practised before the looking-glass till every gesture has its
drill!"
Then I gazed on those stars which provoke our questionings, and return no
answer, till my heart grew full,--so full,--and I bowed my head and wept
like a child.
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.
And still no letter from you! I see in the journals that you have left
Nice. Is it that you are too absorbed in your work to have leisure to
write to me? I know you are not ill, for if you were, all Paris would
know of it. All Europe has an interest in your health. Positively I
will write to you no more till a word from yourself bids me do so.
I fear I must give up my solitary walks in the Bois de Boulogne: they
were very dear to me, partly because the quiet path to which I confined
myself was that to which you directed me as the one you habitually
selected when at Paris, and in which you had brooded over and revolved
the loveliest of your romances; and partly because it was there that,
catching, alas! not inspiration but enthusiasm from the genius that had
hallowed the place, and dreaming I might originate music, I nursed my own
aspirations and murmured my own airs. And though so close to that world
of Paris to which all artists must appeal for judgment or audience, the
spot was so undisturbed, so sequestered. But of late that path has lost
its solitude, and therefore its charm.
Six days ago the first person I encountered in my walk was a man whom I
did not then heed. He seemed in thought, or rather in revery, like
myself; we passed each other twice or thrice, and I did not notice
whether he was young or old, tall or short; but he came the next day, and
a third day, and then I saw that he was young, and, in so regarding him,
his eyes became fixed on mine. The fourth day he did not come, but two
other men came, and the look of one was inquisitive and offensive. They
sat themselves down on a bench in the walk, and though I did not seem to
notice them, I hastened home; and the next day, in talking with our kind
Madame Savarin, and alluding to these quiet walks of mine, she hinted,
with the delicacy which is her characteristic, that the customs of Paris
did not allow demoiselles _comme il faut_ to walk alone even in the most
sequestered paths of the Bois.
I begin now to comprehend your disdain of customs which impose chains so
idly galling on the liberty of our sex.
We dined with the Savarins last evening: what a joyous nature he has!
Not reading Latin, I only know Horace by translations, which I am told
are bad; but Savarin seems to me a sort of half Horace,--Horace on his
town-bred side, so playfully well-bred, so good-humoured in his
philosophy, so affectionate to friends, and so biting to foes. But
certainly Savarin could not have lived in a country farm upon endives and
mallows. He is town-bred and Parisian, _jusqu'au bout des ongles_. How
he admires you, and how I love him for it! Only in one thing he
disappoints me there. It is your style that he chiefly praises:
certainly that style is matchless; but style is only the clothing of
thought, and to praise your style seems to me almost as invidious as the
compliment to some perfect beauty, not on her form and face, but on her
taste and dress.
We met at dinner an American and his wife,--a Colonel and Mrs. Morley:
she is delicately handsome, as the American women I have seen generally
are, and with that frank vivacity of manner which distinguishes them from
English women. She seemed to take a fancy to me, and we soon grew very
good friends.
She is the first advocate I have met, except yourself, of that doctrine
upon the rights of Women, of which one reads more in the journals than
one hears discussed in salons. Naturally enough I felt great interest in
that subject, more especially since my rambles in the Bois were
forbidden; and as long as she declaimed on the hard fate of the women
who, feeling within them powers that struggle for air and light beyond
the close precinct of household duties, find themselves restricted from
fair rivalry with men in such fields of knowledge and toil and glory as
men since the world began have appropriated to themselves, I need not say
that I went with her cordially: you can guess that by my former letters.
But when she entered into the detailed catalogue of our exact wrongs and
our exact rights, I felt all the pusillanimity of my sex and shrank back
in terror.
Her husband, joining us when she was in full tide of eloquence, smiled at
me with a kind of saturnine mirth. "Mademoiselle, don't believe a word
she says: it is only tall talk! In America the women are absolute
tyrants, and it is I who, in concert with my oppressed countrymen, am
going in for a platform agitation to restore the Rights of Men."
Upon this there was a lively battle of words between the spouses, in
which, I must own, I thought the lady was decidedly worsted.
No, Eulalie, I see nothing in these schemes for altering our relations
towards the other sex which would improve our condition. The
inequalities we suffer are not imposed by law,--not even by convention:
they are imposed by nature.
Eulalie, you have had an experience unknown to me: you have loved. In
that day did you,--you, round whom poets and sages and statesmen gather,
listening to your words as to an oracle,--did you feel that your pride of
genius had gone out from you, that your ambition lived in whom you loved,
that his smile was more to you than the applause of a world?
I feel as if love in a woman must destroy her rights of equality, that it
gives to her a sovereign even in one who would be inferior to herself if
her love did not glorify and crown him. Ah! if I could but merge this
terrible egotism which oppresses me, into the being of some one who is
what I would wish to be were I man! I would not ask him to achieve fame.
Enough if I felt that he was worthy of it, and happier methinks to
console him when he failed than to triumph with him when he won. Tell
me, have you felt this? When you loved did you stoop as to a slave, or
did you bow down as to a master?
FROM MADAME DE GRANTMESNIL TO ISAURA CICOGNA.
_Chere enfant_,--All your four letters have reached me the same day. In
one of my sudden whims I set off with a few friends on a rapid tour along
the Riviera to Genoa, thence to Turin on to Milan. Not knowing where we
should rest even for a day, my letters were not forwarded.
I came back to Nice yesterday, consoled for all fatigues in having
insured that accuracy in description of localities which my work
necessitates.
You are, my poor child, in that revolutionary crisis through which genius
passes in youth before it knows its own self, and longs vaguely to do or
to be a something other than it has done or has been before. For, not to
be unjust to your own powers, genius you have,--that inborn undefinable
essence, including talent, and yet distinct from it. Genius you have,
but genius unconcentrated, undisciplined. I see, though you are too
diffident to say so openly, that you shrink from the fame of singer,
because, fevered by your reading, you would fain aspire to the thorny
crown of author. I echo the hard saying of the Maestro: I should be your
worst enemy did I encourage you to forsake a career in which a dazzling
success is so assured, for one in which, if it were your true vocation,
you would not ask whether you were fit for it; you would be impelled to
it by the terrible star which presides over the birth of poets.
Have you, who are so naturally observant, and of late have become so
reflective, never remarked that authors, however absorbed in their own
craft, do not wish their children to adopt it? The most successful
author is perhaps the last person to whom neophytes should come for
encouragement. This I think is not the case with the cultivators of the
sister arts.
The painter, the sculptor, the musician, seem disposed to invite
disciples and welcome acolytes. As for those engaged in the practical
affairs of life, fathers mostly wish their sons to be as they have been.
The politician, the lawyer, the merchant, each says to his children,
"Follow my steps." All parents in practical life would at least agree
in this,--they would not wish their sons to be poets. There must be some
sound cause in the world's philosophy for this general concurrence of
digression from a road of which the travellers themselves say to those
whom they love best, "Beware!"
Romance in youth is, if rightly understood, the happiest nutriment of
wisdom in after-years; but I would never invite any one to look upon the
romance of youth as a thing
"To case in periods and embalm in ink."
Enfant, have you need of a publisher to create romance? Is it not in
yourself? Do not imagine that genius requires for its enjoyment the
scratch of the pen and the types of the printer. Do not suppose that the
poet, the romancier, is most poetic, most romantic, when he is striving,
struggling, labouring, to check the rush of his ideas, and materialize
the images which visit him as souls into such tangible likenesses of
flesh and blood that the highest compliment a reader can bestow on them
is to say that they are lifelike: No: the poet's real delight is not in
the mechanism of composing; the best part of that delight is in the
sympathies he has established with innumerable modifications of life and
form, and art and Nature, sympathies which are often found equally keen
in those who have not the same gift of language. The poet is but the
interpreter. What of?--Truths in the hearts of others. He utters what
they feel. Is the joy in the utterance? Nay, it is in the feeling
itself. So, my dear, dark-bright child of song, when I bade thee open,
out of the beaten thoroughfare, paths into the meads and river-banks at
either side of the formal hedgerows, rightly dost thou add that I
enjoined thee to make thine art thy companion. In the culture of that
art for which you are so eminently gifted, you will find the ideal life
ever beside the real. Are you not ashamed to tell me that in that art
you do but utter the thoughts of others? You utter them in music;
through the music you not only give to the thoughts a new character, but
you make them reproductive of fresh thoughts in your audience.
You said very truly that you found in composing you could put into music
thoughts which you could not put into words. That is the peculiar
distinction of music. No genuine musician can explain in words exactly
what he means to convey in his music.
How little a libretto interprets an opera; how little we care even to
read it! It is the music that speaks to us; and how?--Through the human
voice. We do not notice how poor are the words which the voice warbles.
It is the voice itself interpreting the soul of the musician which
enchants and enthralls us. And you who have that voice pretend to
despise the gift. What! despise the power of communicating delight!--the
power that we authors envy; and rarely, if ever, can we give delight with
so little alloy as the singer.
And when an audience disperses, can you guess what griefs the singer
may have comforted? what hard hearts he may have softened? what high
thoughts he may have awakened?
You say, "Out on the vamped-up hypocrite! Out on the stage-robes and
painted cheeks!"
I say, "Out on the morbid spirit which so cynically regards the mere
details by which a whole effect on the minds and hearts and souls of
races and nations can be produced!"
There, have I scolded you sufficiently? I should scold you more, if I
did not see in the affluence of your youth and your intellect the cause
of your restlessness. Riches are always restless. It is only to poverty
that the gods give content.
You question me about love; you ask if I have ever bowed to a master,
ever merged my life in another's: expect no answer on this from me.
Circe herself could give no answer to the simplest maid, who, never
having loved, asks, "What is love?"
In the history of the passions each human heart is a world in itself; its
experience profits no others. In no two lives does love play the same
part or bequeath the same record.
I know not whether I am glad or sorry that the word "love" now falls on
my ear with a sound as slight and as faint as the dropping of a leaf in
autumn may fall on thine.
I volunteer but this lesson, the wisest I can give, if thou canst
understand it: as I bade thee take art into thy life, so learn to look on
life itself as an art. Thou couldst discover the charm in Tasso; thou
couldst perceive that the requisite of all art, that which pleases, is in
the harmony of proportion. We lose sight of beauty if we exaggerate the
feature most beautiful.
Love proportioned adorns the homeliest existence; love disproportioned
deforms the fairest.
Alas! wilt thou remember this warning when the time comes in which it may
be needed?
E----- G-------.
