A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies Part 29

whereas this could have been said with truth by Mendelsohn and by Litzst. In Mendelsohn the enormous creative power was modified by the intellect and the conscience. Litzst has no creative power.

Litzst has thus drawn the character of Chopin:-"Rien n'etait plus pur et plus exalte en meme temps que ses pensees; rien n'etait plus tenace, plus exclusif, et plus minutieus.e.m.e.nt devoue que ses affections. Mais cet etre ne comprenait que ce qui etait identique a lui-meme:-le reste n'existait pour lui que comme une sorte de reve facheux, auquel il essayait de se soustraire en vivant au milieu du monde. Toujours perdu dans ses reveries, la realite lui deplaisait. Enfant il ne pouvait toucher a un instrument tranchant sans se blesser; homme il ne pouvait se trouver en face d'un homme different de lui, sans se heurter contre cette contradiction vivante."

"Ce qui le preservait d'un antagonisme perpetuel c'etait l'habitude volontaire et bientot inveteree de ne point voir, de ne pas entendre ce qui lui deplaisait: en general sans toucher a ses affections personelles, les etres qui ne pensaient pas comme lui devenaient a ses yeux comme des especes de fantomes; et comme il etait d'une politesse charmante, on pouvait prendre pour une bienveillance courtoise ce qui n'etait chez lui qu'un froid dedain-une aversion insurmontable."

108.

The father of Mozart was a man of high and strict religious principle.

He had a conviction-in his case more truly founded than is usual-that he was the father of a great, a surpa.s.sing genius, and consequently of a being unfortunate in this, that he must be in advance of his age, exposed to error, to envy, to injustice, to strife; and to do his duty to his son demanded large faith and large firmness. But because he _did_ estimate this sacred trust as a duty to be discharged, not only with respect to his gifted son, but to the G.o.d who had so endowed him; so, in spite of many mistakes, the earnest straightforward endeavour to do right in the parent seems to have saved Mozart's moral life, and to have given that completeness to the productions of his genius, which the harmony of the moral and creative faculties alone can bestow.

"The modifying power of circ.u.mstances on Mozart's style, is an interesting consideration. Whatever of striking, of new or beautiful he met with in the works of others left its impression on him; and he often reproduced these efforts, not servilely, but mingling his own nature and feelings with them in a manner not less surprising than delightful."

This is true equally of Shakespeare and of Raphael, both of whom adapted or rather adopted much from their precursors in the way of material to work upon; and whose incomparable originality consisted in the interfusion of their own great individual genius with every subject they touched, so that it became theirs, and could belong to no other.

The Figaro was composed at Vienna. The Don Juan and Clemenza di t.i.to at Prague;-which I note because the localities are so characteristic of the operas. Cimarosa's Matrimonio Segreto was composed at Prague; it was on the fortification of the Hradschin one morning at sun-rise that he composed the _Pria che spunti in ciel l'aurora_.

When called upon to describe his method of composing, what Mozart said of himself was very striking from its _navete_ and truth. "I do not,"

he said, "aim at originality. I do not know in what my originality consists. Why my productions take from my hand that particular form or style which makes them _Mozartish_, and different from the works of other composers is probably owing to the same cause which makes my nose this or that particular shape; makes it, in short, Mozart's nose, and different from other people's."

Yet, as a composer, Mozart was as _objective_, as dramatic, as Shakspeare and Raphael; Chopin, in comparison, was wholly _subjective_,-the Byron of Music.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

109.

Talking once with Adelaide Kemble, after she had been singing in the "Figaro," she compared the music to the bosom of a full blown rose in its voluptuous, intoxicating richness. I said that some of Mozart's melodies seemed to me not so much composed, but found-found on some sunshiny day in Arcadia, among nymphs and flowers. "Yes," she replied, with ready and felicitous expression, "not _inventions_, but _existences_."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

110.

Old George the Third, in his blindness and madness, once insisted on making the selection of pieces for the concert of ancient music (May, 1811),-it was soon after the death of the Princess Amelia. "The programme included some of the finest pa.s.sages in Handel's 'Samson,'

descriptive of blindness; the 'Lamentation of Jephthah,' for his daughter; Purcel's 'Mad Tom,' and closed with 'G.o.d save the King,' to make sure the application of all that went before."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

111.

Every one who remembers what Madlle. Rachel was seven or eight years ago, and who sees her now (1853), will allow that she has made no progress in any of the essential excellences of her art:-a certain proof that she is not a great artist in the true sense of the word. She is a finished actress, but she is nothing more, and nothing better; not enough the artist ever to forget or conceal her art; consequently there is a want somewhere, which a mind highly toned and of quick perceptions feels from beginning to end. The parts in which she once excelled-the Phedre and the Hermione, for instance-have become formalised and hard, like studies cast in bronze; and when she plays a new part it has no freshness. I always go to see her whenever I can. I admire her as what she is-the Parisian actress, practised in every trick of her _metier_. I admire what she does, I think how well it is all _done_, and am inclined to clap and applaud her drapery, perfect and ostentatiously studied in every fold, just with the same feeling that I applaud herself.

As to the last scene of Adrienne Lecouvreur, (which those who are _avides de sensation_, athirst for painful emotion, go to see as they would drink a dram, and critics laud as a miracle of art,) it is altogether a mistake and a failure; it is beyond the just limits of terror and pity-beyond the legitimate sphere of _art_. It reminds us of the story of Gentil Bellini and the Sultan. The Sultan much admired Bellini's picture of the decollation of John the Baptist, but informed him that it was inaccurate-surgically-for the tendons and muscles ought to shrink where divided; and then calling for one of his slaves, he drew his scimitar, and striking off the head of the wretch, gave the horror-struck artist a lesson in practical anatomy. So we might possibly learn from Rachel's imitative representation, (studied in an hospital as they say,) how poison acts on the frame, and how the limbs and features writhe into death; but if she were a great moral artist she would feel that what is allowed to be true in painting, is true in art generally; that mere imitation, such as the vulgar delight in, and hold up their hands to see, is the vulgarest and easiest aim of the imitative arts, and that between the true interpretation of poetry in art and such base mechanical means to the lowest ends, there lies an immeasurable distance.

I am disposed to think that Rachel has not genius, but talent, and that her talent, from what I see year after year, has a downward tendency,-there is not sufficient moral seasoning to save it from corruption. I remember that when I first saw her in Hermione she reminded me of a serpent, and the same impression continues. The long meagre form with its graceful undulating movements, the long narrow face and features, the contracted jaw, the high brow, the brilliant supernatural eyes which seem to glance every way at once; the sinister smile; the painted red lips, which look as though they had lapped, or could lap, blood; all these bring before me the idea of a Lamia, the serpent nature in the woman's form. In Lydia, and in Athalie, she touches the extremes of vice and wickedness with such a masterly lightness and precision, that I am full of wondering admiration for the actress. There is not a turn of her figure, not an expression in her face, not a fold in her gorgeous drapery, that is not a study; but withal such a consciousness of her art, and such an ostentation of the means she employs, that the power remains always _extraneous_, as it were, and exciting only to the senses and the intellect.

Latterly she has become a hard mannerist. Her face, once so flexible, has lost the power of expressing the nicer shades and softer gradations of feeling; so much so, that they write dramas for her with supernaturally wicked and depraved heroines to suit her especial powers.

I conceive that an artist could not sink lower in degradation. Yet to satisfy the taste of a Parisian audience and the ambition of a Parisian actress this was not enough, and wickedness required the piquancy of immediate approximation with innocence. In the Valeria she played two characters, and appeared on the stage alternately as a miracle of vice and a miracle of virtue: an abandoned prost.i.tute and a chaste matron.

There was something in this contrasted impersonation, considered simply in relation to the aims and objects of art, so revolting, that I sat in silent and deep disgust, which was partly deserved by the audience which could endure the exhibition.

It is the entire absence of the high poetic and moral element which distinguishes Rachel as an actress, and places her at such an immeasurable distance from Mrs. Siddons, that it shocks me to hear them named together.

112.

It is no reproach to a capital actress to play effectively a very wicked character. Mrs. Siddons played the abandoned Milwood as carefully, as completely as she played Hermoine and Constance; but if it had required a perpetual succession of Calistas and Milwoods to call forth her highest powers, what should we think of the woman and the artist?

113.

When dramas and characters are invented to suit the particular talent of a particular actor or actress, it argues rather a limited range of the artistic power; though within that limit the power may be great and the talent genuine.

Thus for Liston and for Miss O'Neil, so distinguished in their respective lines of Comedy and Tragedy, characters were especially constructed and plays written, which have not been acted since their time.

114.

A celebrated German actress (who has quitted the stage for many years) speaking of Rachel, said that the reason she must always stop short of the highest place in art, is because she is nothing but an actress-that only; and has no aims in life, has no duties, feelings, employments, sympathies, but those which centre in herself in the interests of her art;-which thus ceases to be _art_ and becomes a _metier_.

This reminded me of what Pauline Viardot once said to me:-"D'abord je suis _femme_, avec les devoirs, les affections, les sentiments d'une femme; et puis je suis _artiste_."

115.

The same German actress whose opinion I have quoted, told me that the Leonora and the Iphigenia of Goethe were the parts she preferred to play. The Thekla and the Beatrice of Schiller next. (In all these she excelled.) The parts easiest to her, requiring no effort scarcely, were Jerta (in Houwald's Tragedy, "Die Schuld"), and Clarchen in Egmont; of the character of Jerta, she said beautifully:-"Ich habe es nicht gespielt, Ich habe es gesagt!" (I did not _play_ it, I _uttered_ it.) This was extremely characteristic of the woman.

I once asked Mrs. Siddons, which of her great characters she preferred to play? She replied, after a moment's consideration, and in her rich deliberate emphatic tones:-"Lady Macbeth is the character I have most _studied_." She afterwards said that she had played the character during thirty years, and scarcely acted it once, without carefully reading over the part and generally the whole play in the morning; and that she never read over the play without finding something new in it; "something," she said, "which had not struck me so much as it _ought_ to have struck me."

Of Mrs. Pritchard, who preceded Mrs. Siddons in the part of Lady Macbeth, it was well known that she had never read the play. She merely studied her own part as written out by the stage-copyist; of the other parts she knew nothing but the _cues_.

116.

When I asked Mrs. Henry Siddons, which of her characters she preferred playing? she said at once "Imogen, in Cymbeline, was the character I played with most ease to myself, and most success as regarded the public; it cost no effort."

This was confirmed by others. A very good judge said of her-"In some of her best parts, as Juliet, Rosalind, and Lady Townley, she may have been approached or equalled. In Viola and Imogen she was never equalled. In the grace and simplicity of the first, in the refinement and shy but impa.s.sioned tenderness of the last, _I_ at least have never seen any one to be compared to her. She hardly seemed to _act_ these parts; they came naturally to her."

This reminds me of another anecdote of the same accomplished actress and admirable woman. The people of Edinburgh, among whom she lived, had so identified her with all that was gentle, refined and n.o.ble, that they did not like to see her play wicked parts. It happened that G.o.dwin went down to Edinburgh with a tragedy in his pocket, which had been accepted by the theatre there, and in which Mrs. Henry Siddons was to play the princ.i.p.al part-that of a very wicked woman (I forget the name of the piece). He was warned that it risked the success of his play, but her conception of the part was so just and spirited, that he persisted. At the rehearsal she stopped in the midst of one of her speeches and said, with great _navete_, "I am afraid, Mr. G.o.dwin, the people will not endure to hear me say this!" He replied coolly, "My dear, you cannot be always young and pretty-you must come to this at last,-go on." He mistook her meaning and the feeling of "the people." The play failed; and the audience took care to discriminate between their disapprobation of the piece and their admiration for the actress.

117.