human reason; soothing, even when it the giant tragedies of Shakespeare, have excited; inaking earth nearer to heaven. made Englishmen more willing to die for And when I ran on in this strain to you England. In fine, it was long before - I after my own wild fashion, you took my will not say I understood or rightly aphead between your hands and kissed me, preciated Shakespeare, for no Englishman and said, "Happy are those who believe! would admit that I or even you could ever long may that happiness be thine!" do so-but before I could recognize the Why did I not feel in Dante the Christian justice of the place his country claims charm that I felt in Tasso? Dante in for him as the genius without an equal in your eyes, as in those of most judges, the literature of Europe. Meanwhile the is infinitely the greater genius, but re- ardour I had put into study, and the wear flected on the dark stream of that genius and tear of the emotions which the study the stars are so troubled, the heaven so called forth, made themselves felt in a rethreatening. turn of my former illness, with symptoms Just as my year of holiday was expiring still more alarming; and when the year. I turned to English literature; and Shake- was out I was ordained to rest for perspeare, of course, was the first English haps another year before I could sing in poet put into my hands. It proves how public, still less appear on the stage. How childlike my mind still was, that my earli- I rejoiced when I heard that fiat, for I est sensation in reading him was that of emerged from that year of study with a disappointment. It was not only that, heart utterly estranged from the profesdespite my familiarity with English sion in which I had centred my hopes (thanks chiefly to the care of him whom I before Yes, Eulalie, you had bid call my second father), there is much in me accomplish myself for the arts of utthe metaphorical diction of Shakespeare terance by the study of arts in which which I failed to comprehend; but he thoughts originate the words they emseemed to me so far like the modern ploy, and in doing so I had changed French writers who affect to have found myself into another being. I was forinspiration in his muse, that he obtrudes bidden all fatigue of mind; my books 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 And now I have poured forth that the "Hamlet." In the first an equal ca- heart to you-would you persuade me lamity befals the good, but in their ca- still to be a singer? If you do, rememlamity they are blessed. The death of ber at least how jealous and absorbing the martyr is the triumph of his creed. the art of the singer and of the actress is. But when we have put down the English How completely I must surrender myself tragedy when Hamlet and Ophelia are to it, and live among books, or among 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. 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. dreams, no more. Can I be anything else but a 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 meI must tell you the ambition, and add that I have reIn the "Horaces" of Corneille there nounced it as a vain one. I had hoped are fierce contests, rude passions, tears that I could compose, I mean in music. drawn from some of the bitterest sources I was pleased with some things I did— of human pity; but then through all they expressed in music what I could not stands out, large and visible to the eyes express in words; and one secret object of all spectators, the great ideal of de- in coming here was to submit them to the voted patriotism. How much of all that great Mastro. He listened to them pahas been grandest in the life of France, tiently; he complimented me on my acredeeming even its worst crimes of revo-curacy in the mechanical laws of compo-. lution in the love of country, has had its origin in the "Horaces" of Corneille. But I doubt if the fates of Coriolanus, and Cæsar, and Brutus, and Antony, in sition; 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 We went first to see a comedy greatly in vogue, and the author theroughly 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 "And to the abandonment of your vo- not how many tableaux. I found no fault cation as a singer?" 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. in But now to the opera. S 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 manage- | alas! not inspiration but enthusiasm from ment conceals or carries off. The Mastro 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. 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 reverie, 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 in dress. 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 We met at dinner an American and his which you had brooded over and revolved wife-a Colonel and Mrs. Morley: she the loveliest of your romances; and part- is delicately handsome, as the American ly because it was there that, catching,women I have seen generally are, and with that frank vivacity of manner which presses 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. Chère 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 Mastro, 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 gaged in the practical affairs of life, fathers mostly wished their sons to be as they have been. en How little a libretto interprets an opera how little we care even to read it! It The politician, the lawyer, the mer-words. That is the peculiar distinction chant, each says to his children, "Follow of music. No genuine musician can exmy steps." All parents in practical life plain in words exactly what he means to would at least agree in this—they would convey in his music. not wish their sons to be poets. There must be some sound cause in the world's philosophy for this general concurrence is the music that speaks to us; and how? 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. 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? "Out on the vamped-up hypocrite! Out on the stage-robes and painted cheeks!" You say, 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. 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 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 You question me about love: you ask not the same gift of language. The poet if I have ever bowed to a master, ever is but the interpreter. What of? - merged my life in another's: expect no Truths in the hearts of others. He ut-answer on this from me. Circe herself ters what they feel. Is the joy in the ut- could give no answer to the simplest terance? Nay, it is in the feeling itself. maid, who, never having loved, asks, So, my dear, dark-bright child of song, "What is love? "" 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 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 |