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Letters and Notes on Music, by Charles Gounod

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Title: Autobiographical Reminiscences with Family Letters and Notes on Music

Author: Charles Gounod

Translator: W. Hely Hutchinson

Release Date: April 10, 2011 [EBook #35812]

Language: English

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CHARLES GOUNOD


[Illustration: Charles Gounod]




CHARLES GOUNOD

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REMINISCENCES

WITH FAMILY LETTERS AND

NOTES ON MUSIC

FROM THE FRENCH BY

THE HON. W. HELY HUTCHINSON

[Illustration: colophon]

LONDON

WILLIAM HEINEMANN 1896

[_All rights reserved_]

_Printed by_ BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.

_At the Ballantyne Press_




CONTENTS

CHARLES GOUNOD--

                                                                    PAGE

  I. CHILDHOOD                                                         1

  II.   ITALY                                                         54

  III. GERMANY                                                       110

  IV. HOME AGAIN                                                     127

LATER LETTERS OF CHARLES GOUNOD                                      173

BERLIOZ                                                              195

M. CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS AND HIS OPERA "HENRI VIII."                   209

NATURE AND ART                                                       225

THE ACADEMY OF FRANCE AT ROME                                        239

THE ARTIST AND MODERN SOCIETY                                        253




INTRODUCTION

_The following pages contain the story of the most important events of
my artistic life, of the mark left by them on my personal existence, of
their influence on my career, and of the thoughts they have suggested to
my mind.

I do not desire to make any capital out of whatever public interest may
attach to my own person. But I believe the clear and simple narrative of
an artist's life may often convey useful information, hidden under a
word or fact of no apparent importance, but which tallies exactly with
the humour or the need of some particular moment.

An everyday occurrence, a hastily spoken word, often holds its own
opportunity.

Experience teaches; and that which has been useful and salutary to me
may perchance serve others too.

The Author of his own Memoirs must perforce speak frequently, nay
constantly, about himself. It has been my endeavour in this book to do
so with absolute impartiality. I can lay claim to scrupulous exactness
both in detailing facts and in reporting the remarks of others. I have
given my candid opinion of my own work, but the fable tells us the owl
misjudged her own offspring, and I may well be mistaken in mine.

Should Posterity deem me worth remembering at all, it will judge whether
my estimate of myself is a correct one. I can trust Time to allot me,
like every other man, my proper place, or to cast me down if I have been
unduly exalted heretofore.

       *       *       *       *       *

My story bears witness to my love and veneration for the being who
bestows more love than any other earthly creature--my mother! Maternity
is the most perfect reflection of the great Providence; the purest,
warmest ray He casts on earthly life; its inexhaustible solicitude is
the direct effluence of God's eternal care for His own creatures.

If I have worked any good, by word or deed, during my life, I owe it to
my mother, and to her I give the praise. She nursed me, she brought me
up, she formed me; not in her own image, alas!--that would have been too
fair. But the fault of what is lacking lies with me, and not with her.

She sleeps beneath a stone as simple as her blameless life had been. May
this tribute from the son she loved so tenderly form a more imperishable
crown than the wreaths of fading immortelles he laid upon her grave, and
clothe her memory with a halo of reverence and respect he fain would
have endure long after he himself is dead and gone._




CHARLES GOUNOD




I

_CHILDHOOD_


My mother, whose maiden name was Victoire Lemachois, was born at Rouen
on the 4th of June 1780. Her father was a member of the French
magistracy. Her mother, a Mdlle. Heuzey, was a lady of remarkable
intelligence and marvellous artistic aptitude. She was a musician, and a
poetess as well. She composed, sang, and played on the harp; and, as I
have often heard my mother say, she could act tragedy like Mdlle.
Duchesnois, or comedy like Mdlle. Mars.

Attracted by such an uncommon combination of exceptional natural talent,
the best families in the neighbourhood--the D'Houdetots, the De
Mortemarts, the Saint Lamberts, and the D'Herbouvilles--continually
sought her, and literally made her their spoilt child.

But, alas! those talents which give life its greatest charm and
seduction do not always ensure its happiness. Total disparity of tastes,
of inclinations, and of instincts seldom conduce to domestic peace, and
it is dangerous to dream of trying to govern real life by ideal rules of
conduct. The Angel of Peace soon spread her wings and deserted the
household where so many influences combined to make her stay impossible,
and my mother's childhood suffered from the inevitable and painful
consequences. Her life was saddened, perforce, at an age when she and
sorrow should have been strangers.

But God had endowed her with a strong heart, a sound judgment, and
indomitable courage. Bereft of a mother's watchful care, actually
obliged to teach herself how to read and write, she also learnt, alone
and unassisted, the rudiments of music and drawing, arts by which she
was ere long to earn her living.

During the turmoil of the Revolution my grandfather lost his judicial
post at Rouen. My mother's one idea was to get work, so as to be useful
to him. She looked out for piano pupils, found a few, and thus, at
eleven years of age, she began that toilsome life which in after years,
during her widowhood, was to enable her to bring up and educate her
children.

Spurred by her constant desire to improve, and by a sense of duty which
was the dominant feature of her whole life, she realised that a good
teacher must acquire everything that is likely to add weight and
authority to her instructions. She resolved, therefore, to place herself
under the care of some well-known master, to learn all that was
necessary to ensure her own credit and satisfy her conscience. To this
end, little by little--penny by penny, even--she laid by part of the
miserable income which her music lessons brought in, and when a
sufficient sum had been accumulated she took the coach, which in those
days did the journey from Rouen to Paris in three days. On her arrival
in Paris she went straight to Adam, the professor of pianoforte-playing
at the Conservatoire, father of Adolphe Adam, the author of "Le Châlet"
and many other charming works.

Adam received her kindly, and listened to her attentively. He at once
recognised her possession of those qualities which were to foster and
strengthen the interest primarily aroused by her happy facility for her
art.

As my mother's youth forbade her residing permanently in Paris, to
benefit by a regular and consecutive course of instruction, it was
arranged she should travel up from Rouen once in every three months and
take a lesson.

One lesson every three months! A short allowance indeed! and one which
could hardly have seemed likely to repay the cost involved. But certain
individuals are living proofs of the miracle of the loaves and fishes,
and this narrative will show, by many another example, that my mother
was one of them.

A person destined later on to enjoy such solid and well-earned renown as
a teacher of music was not, could not be, in fact, a pupil capable of
forgetting the smallest item of her master's rare and invaluable
lessons. Adam was himself greatly struck by the improvement apparent
between each _séance_ and the next. As much to mark his appreciation of
his young pupil's personal courage, as of her musical talent, he
contrived to get a piano lent her gratis. This allowed of her studying
assiduously without bearing the burden entailed on mind and purse of
paying for her instrument, which, small as it was, had been a heavy tax
upon her small resources.

Soon after this a circumstance occurred which had a decisive influence
on my mother's whole future life.

The fashionable pianoforte composers at that time were Clementi,
Steibelt, Dussek, and some others. I do not mention Mozart, who had
already blazed out upon the musical world, following closely upon Haydn;
nor do I refer to the great Sebastian Bach, whose immortal collection of
preludes and fugues, "Das Wohltemporirte Clavier," published a century
ago, has given the law to pianoforte study, and become the unquestioned
text-book of musical composition. Beethoven, still a young man, had not
yet reached the pinnacle of fame on which his mighty works have now
placed him.

About this period a German musician, named Hullmandel, a violinist of
great merit, and a contemporary and friend of Beethoven's, came and
settled in France, with a view to making a connection as an accompanist.
He stayed some time at Rouen, and while there expressed a wish to hear
the performances of those local young ladies who were considered to have
the greatest musical talent. A sort of competition was organised, in
which my mother took part. She had the good fortune of being
particularly noticed and complimented by Hullmandel, who at once fixed
on her as a fit person to receive lessons from him, and to perform with
him at certain houses in the town where music was carefully and even
passionately cultivated.

       *       *       *       *       *

Here ends all I have to tell about my mother's childhood and youth. I
know no further details of her life until her marriage, which took place
in 1806. She was then twenty-six years and a half old.

My father, François Louis Gounod, was born in 1758, and was therefore
slightly over forty-seven years of age at the time of his marriage. He
was a painter of distinguished merit, and my mother has often told me
that great contemporary artists, such as Gérard, Girodet, Guérin, Joseph
Vernet, and Gros, considered him the best draughtsman of his day.

I remember a story about Gérard, which my mother used to tell with
pardonable pride. Covered as he was with honour and glory, a Baron of
the Empire, owning an enormous fortune, the famous artist was noted for
the smartness of his carriages. While driving about one day, he
happened to meet my father, who was walking. "What!" he cried, "Gounod
on foot! and I in a carriage! What a shame!"

My father had studied under Lépicié with Carle Vernet (the son of Joseph
and father of Horace of that ilk). Twice over he competed for the Grand
Prix de Rome. His scrupulous conscientiousness and artistic modesty are
best reflected by the following little incident which occurred during
his youth. The subject given for the "Grand Prix" competition on one of
the occasions mentioned above was "The Woman taken in Adultery." Among
the competitors were my father and the painter Drouais, whose remarkable
picture gained him the Grand Prix. When Drouais showed him his canvas,
my father told him frankly there could be no possible comparison between
it and his own; and, once back in his studio, he destroyed his own work,
which did not seem to him worthy to hang beside his comrade's
masterpiece. This fact will give some idea of his artistic integrity,
which never wavered between the call of justice and that of personal
interest.

Highly educated, with a mind as refined as nature and study could make
it, my father throughout his whole life shrank instinctively from
undertaking any work of great magnitude. The lack of robust health may
partly explain this peculiarity in a man of such great powers; perhaps,
too, the cause may be discovered in his strong tendency towards absolute
freedom and independence of thought. Either circumstance may explain his
dislike to undertaking anything likely to absorb all his time and
strength. The following anecdote gives colour to this view.

Monsieur Denon, at that time Curator of the Louvre Museum, and also, I
believe, Superintendent of the Royal Museums of France, was an intimate
friend of my father's, and had, besides, the highest opinion of his
talent as a draughtsman and etcher. One day he invited him to execute a
number of etchings of the drawings forming the collection known as the
"Cabinet des Medailles," with an annual fee of 10,000 francs during the
period covered by the work. Such an offer meant affluence to a needy
household like ours, in those days especially. The sum would have
provided ample support for husband, wife, and two children. Well! my
father refused point-blank. He would only undertake to do a few
specially ordered portraits and lithographs, some of which are of the
highest artistic value, and carefully treasured by the descendants of
those for whom they were originally executed.

Indeed, my mother's unconquerable energy had to assert itself often
before these very portraits, with their delicate sense of perception and
unerring talent of execution, could leave the studio. How many would
even now have remained unfinished, had she not taken them in hand
herself? How many times had she to set and clean the palettes with her
own hands? And this was but a fraction of her task. As long as his
artistic interest was awake;--while the human side of his model--the
attitude, the expression, the glance, the look, the Soul in
fact--claimed his attention,--my father's work went merrily. But when it
came to small accessories, such as cuffs and ornaments, embroideries and
decorations, ah! then his interest failed him, and his patience too. So
the poor wife took up the brush, cheerfully slaving at the dull details,
and by dint of intelligence and courage finished the work begun with
such enthusiasm and talent, and dropped from instinctive dread of being
bored.

Happily my father had been induced to hold a regular drawing-class in
his own house. This, with what he made by painting, brought us in
enough to live on, and indirectly, as will be apparent later, became the
starting-point of my mother's career as a pianoforte teacher.

So the modest household lived on, till my father was carried off by
congestion of the lungs on the 4th of May 1823. He was sixty-four years
old, and left his widow with two boys--my elder brother, aged fifteen
and a half, and myself, who would be five years old on the 17th of the
following June.

My father, when he left this world, left us without a bread-winner. I
will now proceed to show how my mother, by dint of her wonderful energy
and unequalled tenderness, supplied in "over-flowing measure" that
protection and support of which his death had robbed us.

       *       *       *       *       *

In those days there lived, on the Quai Voltaire, a lithographer of the
name of Delpech. It is not so very long since his name disappeared from
the shop-front of the house he used to occupy. My father had not been
dead many hours before my mother went to him.

"Delpech," she said, "my husband is dead. I am left alone with two boys
to feed and educate. From this out I must be their mother and their
father as well. I mean to work for them. I have come to ask you two
things--first, how to sharpen a lithographer's style; second, how to
prepare the stones.... Leave the rest to me; only I beg of you to get me
work."

My mother's first care was to publish the fact that, if the parents of
pupils at the drawing-class would continue their patronage, there would
be no interruption in the regular course of lessons.

The immediate and unanimous response amply proved the public
appreciation of the courage shown by the noble-hearted woman, who,
instead of letting her grief overwhelm and absorb her, had instantly
risen to the necessity of providing for her fatherless children. The
drawing-class was continued, therefore, and a number of new pupils were
soon added to the attendance. But my mother, being already known to be a
good musician as well as a clever draughtswoman, it came about that many
parents begged her to instruct their daughters in the former art.

She did not hesitate to grasp at this fresh source of income to our
little household, and for some time music and drawing were taught side
by side within our walls; but at length it became necessary to
relinquish either one or the other. It would have been bad policy on
her part to try to do more than physical endurance would permit, and, in
the event, my mother decided to devote herself to music.

       *       *       *       *       *

I was so young when my father died, that my recollection of him is very
indistinct. I can only recall three or four memories of him with any
degree of certainty, but they are as clear as those of yesterday. The
tears rise to my eyes as I commit them to this paper.

One impression indelibly stamped upon my brain is that of seeing him
sitting with his legs crossed (his customary attitude) by the chimney
corner, absorbed in reading, spectacles on nose, dressed in a white
striped jacket and loose trousers, and a cotton cap similar to those
worn by many painters of his day. I have seen the same cap, many years
since then, on the head of Monsieur Ingres, Director of the Académie de
France at Rome--my illustrious, and, I regret to say, departed friend.

As a rule, while my father was thus absorbed in his book, I would be
sprawling flat in the middle of the room, drawing with a white chalk on
a black varnished board, my subjects being eyes, noses, and mouths of
which my father had drawn me models. I can see it all now, as if it were
yesterday, although I could not have been more than four or four and a
half. I was so fond of this employment, I recollect, that had my father
lived, I make no doubt I should have desired to be a painter rather than
a musician; but my mother's profession, and the education she gave me
during my early youth, turned the scale for music.

Shortly after my father's death, which took place in the house which
bore, and still bears, the number 11 in the Place St. André-des-Arts (or
rather "des Arcs"), my mother took another, not very far away from our
old home. Our new abode was at 20 Rue des Grands Augustins. It is from
that flitting that I can date my first real musical impressions.

My mother, who nursed me herself, had certainly given me music with her
milk. She always sang while she was nursing me, and I can faithfully say
I took my first lessons unconsciously, and without being sensible of the
necessity so irksome to any child, and so difficult to impress on him,
of fixing my attention on the instruction I was receiving. I had
acquired a very clear idea of the various intonations, of the musical
intervals they represent, and of the elementary forms of modulation.
Even before I knew how to use my tongue, my ear appreciated the
difference between the major and the minor key. They tell me that
hearing some one in the street--some beggar, doubtless--singing a song
in a minor key, I asked my mother why he sang "as if he were crying."

Thus my ear was thoroughly practised, and I easily held my place, even
at that early age, in a Solfeggio class. I might have acted as its
teacher.

Proud that her little boy should be more than a match for grown-up
girls, especially as it was all thanks to her, my mother could not
resist the natural temptation to showing off her little pupil before
some eminent musical personage.

       *       *       *       *       *

In those days there was a musician of the name of Jadin, whose son and
grandson both made themselves an honoured name among contemporary
painters. Jadin himself was well known as a composer of romances, very
popular in their day. He was, if I am not mistaken, accompanist at the
well-known Choron School of Religious Music.

My mother wrote and asked him to come and pass judgment on my musical
abilities.

Jadin came--put me in the corner of the room, with my face to the wall
(I see that corner now), and sitting down to the piano, improvised a
succession of chords and modulations. At each change he would ask, "What
key am I playing in?" and I never made a single mistake in all my
answers.

He was amazed, and my mother was triumphant. My poor dear mother! Little
she thought that she herself was fostering the birth of a resolve, in
her boy's mind, which was some years later to cause her sore uneasiness
as to his future. Nor did she dream, when she took me, a six-year-old
boy, to the Odéon to hear "Robin Hood," that she had stirred my first
impulse towards the art that was to govern all my life.

My readers will have wondered at my saying nothing so far about my
brother. I must explain that I cannot recall any memory of him till
after I had passed my sixth birthday; prior to that time I remember
nothing of him.

My brother, Louis Urbain Gounod, was ten and a half years older than
myself, he having been born on December 13, 1807.

When he was about twelve he entered the Lycée at Versailles, where he
remained till he was eighteen. My first recollections of that best of
brothers are connected with my memories of Versailles. Alas! I lost him
just when I was beginning to appreciate the value of his fraternal
friendship.

Louis XVIII. had appointed my father Professor of Drawing to the Royal
Pages, and having a strong personal regard for him, he had granted us
permission, during our temporary residence at Versailles, to occupy
rooms in the huge building known as No. 6 Rue de la Surintendance, which
runs from the Place du Château to the Rue de l'Orangerie.

Our apartment, which I remember well, and which could only be reached by
a number of most confusing staircases, looked out over the "Pièce d'Eau
des Suisses" and the big wood of Satory. A corridor ran outside all our
rooms, and looked to me quite endless. It led to a suite of rooms
occupied by the Beaumont family. One of this family, Edouard Beaumont,
was one of my earliest friends. He ultimately became a distinguished
painter. Edouard's father was a sculptor, his duties at that time being
to restore the various statues in the château and park at Versailles,
which duties carried with them the right of occupying the rooms next
ours.

When my father died in 1823, my mother was still allowed to live in
these rooms during the annual holidays. This permission was extended to
her during the reign of Charles X., that is, up to 1830, but was
withdrawn on the accession of Louis-Philippe. My brother, who, as I said
above, was a student at the Lycée at Versailles, always spent his
holidays with us there.

       *       *       *       *       *

An old musician named Rousseau was then chapel-master of the Palace
Chapel at Versailles. His particular instrument was the 'cello (the
"bass," as it was called in those days), and my mother persuaded him to
give my brother lessons. The latter had a beautiful voice, and often
sang in the services at the Royal Chapel.

I really cannot tell whether old Père Rousseau played upon his
violoncello well or ill; what I do clearly remember is that my brother
was not proficient on the instrument. But I was young, and my small mind
could not grasp the fact that playing out of tune was possible; I
thought when an instrument was put into a person's hands, he must
produce pure tone. I had no conception of what the word beginner meant.

Once I was listening to my brother practising in the next room. My ear
was getting very sore from the continual discords, so, in all innocence,
I asked my mother, "Why is Urbain's violoncello so fearfully out of
tune?" I do not remember what she answered, but I am sure she laughed
over my simple question.

I mentioned that my brother had a beautiful voice. I was able to judge
it later on by my own ears. And I can also quote another testimony, that
of Wartel, who often sang with him in the Chapel-Royal at Versailles.
Wartel studied at the Choron School, and sang at the Opera in Nourrit's
time; ultimately he took to teaching, and earned a great and
well-deserved reputation in that line.

       *       *       *       *       *

In 1825 my mother's health broke down. I was then about seven years old.
Our family doctor at that time was Monsieur Baffos; he had brought me
into the world, and had known us all for many years. Our former doctor,
Monsieur Hallé, had recommended him to us when he himself retired. As my
mother's work consisted in giving music lessons at her own house all
the day long, and as the presence of a child of my age was a source of
anxiety and even worry to her, Baffos suggested my spending the day at a
boarding-school, whence I was fetched back every evening at dinner-time.
The school selected was kept by a certain Monsieur Boniface in the Rue
de Touraine, close to the École de Médecine, and not far from our home
in the Rue des Grands Augustins. Its quarters were soon shifted to the
Rue de Condé, nearly opposite the Odéon.

There I first met Duprez, destined to become the celebrated tenor, who
shone so brilliantly on the Opera boards.

Duprez, nine years older than myself, must have been about sixteen or
seventeen at the time I speak of. He was a pupil of Choron's, and taught
Solfeggio in Monsieur Boniface's school. He soon took a fancy to me when
he found I could read a musical score with the same ease as a printed
book--much better indeed, I make no doubt, than I can do it now. He used
to take me on his knee, and when one of my little comrades made a
mistake, would say, "Come, little man, show them how to do it!"

Years afterwards I reminded him of this fact, now so far behind us both.
It seemed to come back to him suddenly and he cried, "What! were you the
small boy who solfa-ed so well?"

But it was growing high time for me to set about my education after a
more serious and systematic fashion. Monsieur Boniface's establishment
was really more of a day nursery than a school.

       *       *       *       *       *

So I was entered as a boarder at Monsieur Letellier's institution in the
Rue de Vaugirard, at the corner of the Rue Ferou. Monsieur Letellier
soon retired, and was succeeded by Monsieur de Reusse. I remained there
for a year, and was then removed to the school of Monsieur
Hallays-Dabot, in the Place de l'Estrapade, close to the Panthéon.

My recollection of Monsieur Hallays-Dabot and his wife is as clear and
distinct as though they were present here. Nothing could exceed the
warm-hearted kindness of my reception in their house. It sufficed to
dispel my horror of a system from which I had an instinctive shirking.
The almost paternal care they gave me quite destroyed this feeling, and
allayed the doubts I had entertained as to the possibility of being
happy in a boarding-school.

The two years I spent in his house were, in fact, two of the happiest in
my life; his even-handed justice and his kindly affection never failed.

When I reached the age of eleven it was decided that my education should
be continued at the Lycée St. Louis. When I left Monsieur
Hallays-Dabot's care, he gave me a certificate of character so
flattering in its terms that I refrain from reproducing it. I have felt
it a duty to make this public acknowledgment of all he did for me.

The good testimonials I brought from Monsieur Hallays-Dabot's
establishment gained me a _quart de bourse_ at the Lycée St. Louis,[1]
which I accordingly entered at the close of the holidays in October
1829. I was then just eleven years old.

The then Principal of the Lycée was an ecclesiastic, the Abbé Ganser, a
gentle, quiet-natured man much inclined to meditation, and very paternal
in his dealings with his pupils.

I was at once put into what was known as the sixth class. From the
outset of my school career I had the good fortune of being under a man
who, in the course of the years I studied with him, gained my deepest
affection--Adolphe Régnier, Membre de l'Institut, my dear and honoured
master, formerly the tutor, and still, as I write, the friend of the
Comte de Paris.

I was not stupid, and as a rule my teachers liked me; but I must confess
I was very careless, and was often punished for inattention, even more
so during preparation hours than in the actual school-work.

I mentioned that I joined St. Louis as a "quarter scholar." This means
that my college fees were reduced one-quarter. It was incumbent on me to
endeavour, by diligence and good conduct, to rise to the position of
half scholar, three-quarter scholar, and finally to that of full
scholar, and so relieve my mother of the expense of keeping me at
college. Seeing I adored my mother, and that my greatest joy should
therefore have been to help her by my own exertions, this sacred object
ought to have been ever present with me.

But woe is me! Instincts forcibly repressed are apt to wake again with
tenfold fierceness. And so mine did, many a time and often--far too
often, alas!

One day I had got into a scrape for some piece of carelessness or other,
some exercise unfinished, or lesson left unlearnt. I suppose I thought
my punishment out of proportion to my crime, for I complained, the sole
result being that the penalty was largely increased. I was marched off
to the college prison, a sort of dungeon, where I was to be kept on
bread and water till I had finished an enormous imposition of I know not
how many lines, some five hundred or a thousand, I think--something
absurd, I know! When I found myself under lock and key I began to think
I was a brute. The feelings of Orestes when the Furies reproached him
with his mother's death were not more bitter than mine when I was given
my prison fare! I looked at the bread, and burst into tears. "Oh! you
scoundrel, you brute, you beast," I cried; "look at the bread your
mother earns for you! Your mother who is coming to see you after school,
and will hear you are in prison, and will go home weeping through the
streets, without having seen or kissed you! Come, come, you are a
wretch; you do not even deserve to have dry bread!"

And I put it aside, and went hungry.

However, in my normal condition I worked on fairly enough, and, thanks
to the prizes I won every year, I gradually progressed towards that
ardently wished-for goal, a "full scholarship."

There was a chapel in the Lycée Saint Louis, where musical masses were
sung every Sunday. The gallery, which occupied the full width of the
chapel, was divided into two parts, and in one of these were the
choristers' seats and the organ. When I joined the Lycée, the
chapel-master was Hyppolyte Monpou, then accompanist at the Choron
School of Music, well known in later years as the composer of a number
of melodies and theatrical works, which brought him some considerable
popularity.

       *       *       *       *       *

Thanks to the training my mother had given me ever since my babyhood, I
could read music at sight; and my voice was sweet and very true. On
entering the college I was at once handed over to Monpou, who was
astonished by my aptness, and forthwith appointed me solo soprano of
his little choir, which consisted of two sopranos, two altos, two
tenors, and two basses.

I lost my voice owing to a blunder of Monpou's. He insisted on my
singing while it was breaking, although complete silence and rest are
indispensable while the vocal chords are in their transitional stage;
and I never recovered the power and ring and tone I had as a child, and
which constitute a really good singing voice. Mine has always been husky
ever since. But for this accident, I believe I should have sung well in
after life.

At the Revolution of 1830, the Abbé Ganser ceased to be our Principal.
He was succeeded by Monsieur Liez, a former Professor at the Lycée Henri
IV., strongly attached to the new régime, and a zealous advocate of the
system of military drill forthwith introduced into the various colleges.
He used to come and watch us drilling, standing bolt upright like any
sergeant instructor or colonel on parade, and with his right hand thrust
into the breast of his coat, like Napoleon I.

Two years afterwards Monsieur Liez was superseded by Monsieur Poirson.
It was while he was Principal that the various circumstances which
decided the ultimate bent of my life took place.

Among my many faults was one pet sin. I worshipped music; the first
storms that ruffled the surface of my youthful existence originated with
the overmastering passion, which had such paramount influence on my
ultimate career.

       *       *       *       *       *

Anybody who knows anything about a Lycée has heard of the Festival of
Saint Charlemagne, so dear to every schoolboy.

One feature of the festival is a great banquet, to which every student
who has gained either one first or two second places in the various
competitions during that term is bidden. On this banquet follows a two
days' holiday, which gives the boys a chance of "sleeping out"--in other
words, of spending a night at home--a rare treat universally coveted.

The festival fell in mid-winter. In 1831 I had the good luck to be one
of the invited guests; and to reward me, my mother promised I should go
in the evening to the Théâtre Italien with my brother, to hear Rossini's
"Otello." Malibran played Desdemona; Rubini, Otello; and Lablache, the
Father.

I was nearly wild with impatience and delight. I remember I could not
eat for excitement, so that my mother said to me at dinner, "If you
don't eat your dinner I won't let you go to the opera," and forthwith I
began to consume my victuals, in a spirit of resignation at all events.

We had dined early that evening, as we had no reserved seats (this would
have been far too costly), and we had to be at the opera house before
the doors were opened, with the crowd of people who waited on the chance
of finding a couple of places untaken in the pit. Even this was a
terrible expense to my poor mother, as the seats cost 3 frs. 75 c. each.

It was bitterly cold; for two mortal hours did Urbain and I wait,
stamping our frozen toes, for the happy moment when the string of people
began to move past the ticket office window.

We got inside at last. Never shall I forget my first sight of the great
theatre, the curtain and the brilliant lights. I felt as if I were in
some temple, as if a heavenly vision must shortly rise upon my sight.

At last the solemn moment came. I heard the stage-manager's three
knocks, and the overture began. My heart was beating like a
sledge-hammer.

Oh, that night! that night! what rapture, what Elysium! Malibran,
Rubini, Lablache, Tamburini (he sang Iago); the voices, the orchestra! I
was literally beside myself.

I left that theatre completely out of tune with the prosaic details of
my daily life, and absolutely wedded to the dream which was to be the
very atmosphere and fixed ideal of my existence.

That night I never closed my eyes; I was haunted, "possessed;" I was
wild to write an "Otello" myself!

I am ashamed to say my work in school betrayed my state of mind. I
scamped my duties in every possible way; I used to dash off my exercises
without making any draft, so as to gain more time to give to musical
composition, my favourite occupation--the only one worth attention, as
it seemed to me. Many were the tears and heavy the troubles that
resulted. One day, the master on duty, seeing me scribbling away on
music paper, came and asked for my work. I handed him my fair copy. "And
where is your rough draft?" said he. As I hadn't got one to show, he
snatched my music paper and tore it up. Of course I objected, and got
punished for my pains. Another protest, and an appeal to the Principal,
only resulted in a repetition of the old story; I was kept in school,
given extra work, imprisoned, &c., &c.

This first tormenting, far from having its intended effect, only
inflamed my ardour, and made me resolve to ensure myself free indulgence
of my taste by doing my school-work thoroughly and regularly.

Thus things stood when I took the step of drawing up a kind of
"profession of faith," wherein I warned my mother of my fixed
determination to embrace the artistic career. I had hesitated some time,
so I declared, between music and painting; but I was now convinced that
whatever talent I possessed would find its best outlet in the former
art, and my decision, I added, was final.

My poor mother was distracted. She knew too well all an artist's life
entails, and probably she shrank from the thought that her son's might
be no better than a second edition of the bitter struggle she had shared
with my poor father.

In her despair she sought our Principal, Monsieur Poirson, and consulted
him about her trouble. He cheered her up.

"Do not be the least uneasy," so he spoke to her; "your son shall not be
a musician. He is a good little boy, and does his lessons well. The
masters are all pleased with him. I will take the matter into my own
hands, and later on you will see him in the École Normale. Do not worry
about him, Madame Gounod; as I said before, your son shall not be a
musician."

My mother retired, greatly comforted, and the Principal sent for me to
his study.

"Well, little man," said he, "what is this I hear? You want to be a
musician?"

"Yes, sir."

"But what are you dreaming of? A musician has no real position at all!"

"What, sir! Is it not a position in itself to be able to call oneself
Mozart or Rossini?" Fourteen-year-old boy as I was, I felt a glow of
indignant pride.

The Principal's face changed at once.

"Oh! you look at it in that way, do you? Very well. Let us see if you
have the making of a musician in you. I have had a box at the Opera for
over ten years, so I am a pretty fair judge."

He opened a drawer, took out a sheet of paper, and wrote down some lines
of poetry.

"Take this away," he said, "and set it to music for me."

Full of delight, I took my leave and went back to the class-room. On the
way I devoured the poetry he had given me, with feverish haste. It was
the romance from "Joseph"--"À peine au sortir de l'enfance," &c.

I had never heard of "Joseph" nor of Méhul, so I had no reminiscences to
confuse me or make me fear I might fall into plagiarism. My profound
indifference to Latin exercises, at this rapturous moment, may well be
imagined.

By the next play hour my ballad was set to music, and I hurried with it
to the Principal's room.

"Well! what's the matter, my boy?"

"I have finished the ballad, sir."

"What! already?

"Yes, sir."

"Let me see--now sing it through to me."

"But, sir, I want a piano for the accompaniment."

(I knew there was one in the next room, on which Monsieur Poirson's
daughter was learning music.)

"No, never mind; I don't want a piano."

"Yes, sir, but I do, because of my harmonies."

"Your harmonies! what harmonies? Where are they?"

"Here, sir," said I, putting my finger to my forehead.

"Oh, really! Well, never mind; sing it, all the same. I shall understand
it well enough without the harmonies."

I saw there was no way out of it, so I sang it through.

Before I got half-way through the first verse I saw my judge's eye
soften. Then I took courage--I felt myself winning the game--I went on
boldly, and when I had finished, the Principal said--

"Come, we will go to the piano."

My triumph was certain. I was sure of all my weapons. I sang my little
ballad over again, and at length poor Monsieur Poirson, completely
beaten, took my face in his hands, kissed me with tears in his eyes, and
said--

"Go on, my boy; you _shall_ be a musician!"

My dear mother had acted prudently. Her opposition had been dictated by
her maternal solicitude, but the danger of consenting too precipitately
to my desire was outweighed by the heavy responsibility of perhaps
impeding my natural vocation. The Principal's encouragement robbed my
mother's objections of their chief support, and herself of the aid she
had most reckoned upon to make me change my mind. The assault had been
delivered. The siege had begun. It was time to capitulate. But she held
out as long as she could, and, in her dread of yielding too soon and too
easily to my prayers, she betook herself to the following plan, as her
final resource.

       *       *       *       *       *

There then lived in Paris a German named Antoine Reicha, who had the
highest possible reputation as a theoretical musician. Besides being
Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire (of which Cherubini was at
that time Director), Reicha received private pupils in his own home. My
mother thought of placing me under him to study harmony, counterpoint,
and fugue--the elements of the art of composition, in fact. She
therefore asked the Principal's permission to take me to him on Sundays
during the boys' walking hour. As the time spent in going to and from
Reicha's house, added to that spent over my lesson, practically covered
the same period as the boys' airing, my regular studies were not likely
to be interfered with by this special favour.

The Principal gave his consent, and my mother took me to Reicha's house.
But, before she handed me over to him, she thus (as she told me herself
long afterwards) addressed him privately--

"My dear Monsieur Reicha, I bring you my son, a mere child, who desires
to devote himself to musical composition. I bring him against my own
judgment; I dread an artist's life for him, knowing, as I do, the many
difficulties which beset it. But I will not ever reproach myself, nor
let my son reproach me, with having hindered his career, or spoilt his
happiness. I want to make quite sure, before all else, that his talent
is real and his vocation true. And so I beg you will put him to the
severest test. Place everything that is most difficult before him. If he
is destined to be a true artist, no trouble will discourage him; he will
triumph over it all. If, on the other hand, he loses heart, I shall know
where I am; and shall certainly not allow him to embark on a career,
the first obstacles in which he has not energy to overcome."

Reicha promised my mother I should be treated as she wished; and he kept
his word, as far as in him lay.

As samples of my boyish talent, I had brought him a few sheets of
manuscript music--ballads, preludes, scraps of valses, and so
forth,--the musical trifles my boyish brain had woven.

After looking them over, Reicha said to my mother, "This child already
knows a good deal of what I shall have to teach him, but he is
unconscious of the knowledge he possesses."

In a year or two I had reached a point in my harmony studies which was
rather beyond the elementary stage--counterpoint of all kinds, for
instance, fugues, canons, &c. My mother then asked him--

"Well, what do you think of him?"

"I think, my dear lady, that it is no use trying to stop him; nothing
disheartens him. He finds pleasure and interest in everything; and what
I like best about him is, he always wants to know the 'reason why.'"

"Well," said my mother, "I suppose I must give in."

I knew right well there was no trifling with her. Often she would say to
me--

"You know, if you don't get on well, round comes a cab, and off you go
to the notary." The very idea of a notary's office was enough to make me
do miracles.

But, anyhow, my college reports were good; and though I was threatened
with extra work to make up for lost time, I took good care the masters
should have no cause to complain that my music interfered with my other
studies.

Once indeed I was punished, and pretty sharply too, for having left some
work or other unfinished. The master had given me a heavy imposition,
500 lines or thereabouts to write out. I was writing away (or rather I
was scribbling with the careless haste which is usually bestowed on such
a task) when the usher on duty came to the table. He watched me silently
for some minutes, then laid his hand quietly on my shoulder and said--

"You know you are writing dreadfully badly."

I looked up and answered, "You surely don't think I'm doing it for
pleasure, do you?"

"It only bores you because you do it badly." He went on quietly, "If you
took a little more trouble about it, it would bore you less."

The simple, sensible words, and the gentle and persuasive kindness which
marked their quiet utterance, made such an impression on me, that I do
not think I ever offended again by negligence or inattention to my work.
They brought me a sudden revelation, as complete as it was precise, of
what diligence and attention really mean. I returned to my imposition,
and finished it in a very different frame of mind. The irksomeness of
the task was lost in the satisfaction and benefit of the good advice I
had been given.

Meanwhile my musical studies bore good fruit, and daily grew more and
more absorbing.

My mother seized the opportunity of a vacation of some days' duration,
the New Year's holidays, to give me what was at once a great pleasure
and an exceedingly precious lesson.

Mozart's "Don Giovanni" was being played at the Théâtre Italien, and
thither she took me herself. The exquisite evening I spent with her, in
that small box on the fourth tier, remains one of my most precious and
delicious memories. I am not certain of being right, but I think it was
by Reicha's advice that my mother took me to hear "Don Giovanni."

When I look back on the emotion that masterpiece roused within me, I
feel inclined to doubt whether my pen is capable of describing it, not
indeed faithfully--that were impossible--but even so as to give some
faint conception of what I felt during those matchless hours, whose
charm still lingers with me, as in some luminous vision, some revelation
of hidden glory.

The first notes of the Overture, with the solemn and majestic chords out
of the Commendatore's final scene, seemed to lift me into a new world. I
was chilled by a sensation of actual terror; but when I heard that
terrible threatening roll of ascending and descending scales, stern and
implacable as a death-warrant, I was seized with such shuddering fear,
that my head fell upon my mother's shoulder, and, trembling in the dual
embrace of beauty and of horror, I could only murmur--

"Oh, mother, what music! that is real music indeed!"

Rossini's "Otello" had awakened the germs of my musical instinct; but
the effect "Don Giovanni" had on me was very different in its nature
and results. I think the two impressions might be said to differ in the
same way as those produced on the mind of a painter called from the
study of the Venetian masters to the contemplation of the works of
Raphael, of Leonardo da Vinci, or of Michael Angelo.

Rossini taught me the purely sensuous rapture music gives; he charmed
and enchanted my ear. Mozart, however, did more; to this enjoyment,
already so utterly perfect from a musical and sensuous point of view, he
added the deep and penetrating influence of the most absolute purity
united to the most consummate beauty of expression. I sat in one long
rapture from the beginning of the opera to its close.

The pathetic accents of the trio at the death of the Commendatore, and
of Donna Anna's lamentation over her father's corpse, Zerlina's
fascinating numbers, and the consummate elegance of the trio of the
Masks and of that which opens the second act, under Zerlina's
window--the whole opera, in fact (for in such an immortal work every
page deserves mention), gave me a sense of blissful delight such as can
only be conferred by those supremely beautiful works which command the
admiration of all time, and serve to mark the highest possible level of
æsthetic culture.

This visit to the Opera was the most treasured New Year's gift my
childhood ever knew; and later on, when I won the Grand Prix de Rome, my
dear mother's present to me, in memory of my success, was the score of
"Don Giovanni."

That year was, indeed, particularly propitious to the development of my
musical taste. After hearing "Don Giovanni," I went in Holy Week to two
sacred concerts given by the Conservatoire Concert Society, which
Habeneck then directed. At the first, Beethoven's "Pastoral Symphony"
was played; at the other, the "Choral Symphony" by the same master. This
added fresh impulse to my musical ardour. I remember clearly how these
two performances, besides giving me an inkling of the proud and fearless
personality of that mighty and unrivalled genius, left an instinctive
feeling with me that the composer's language, if I may call it so, was
closely akin, in many ways at least, to that I had first listened to in
"Don Giovanni."

Something told me that these two great talents, each so peerless in its
way, came of a common stock, and professed the same musical dogma.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile my school life was slipping away. My mother had not yet given
up the hope that I might change my mind. She had reckoned on the
lengthening of my school hours to have that effect; but failing this,
she counted on finally dissuading me by telling me that if I drew an
unfavourable number at the conscription I should have to serve, as she
was too poor to pay a substitute.

This was a transparent subterfuge. The poor dear woman, who had often
enough eaten a crust herself so that her children might be filled, would
sooner have sold the very bed she lay on than part with one of us. So,
being old enough to understand and appreciate the gratitude and love I
owed her for such a life of devoted labour and self-sacrifice, I
answered, when she mentioned the conscription to me--

"All right, mother dear; don't let us talk about it. I will see to it
myself. I will win the Grand Prix de Rome, and buy _myself_ off."

I was at that time in the third class at the Lycée. A little incident
which had just occurred in school had gained me a certain amount of
respect amongst my comrades.

Our form master was a Monsieur Roberge, who was desperately fond of
Latin verses. To write good ones was a certain means of getting into his
good books. Some schoolboy trick had been played on him one day, and as
the delinquent would not confess, nor any other boy tell of him,
Monsieur Roberge stopped the whole class's leave. As the Easter
vacation, which meant four or five days' holiday, was at hand, this was
a terrible punishment indeed. Nevertheless, schoolboy honour stood firm,
and the name of the culprit was not divulged.

The idea struck me that if I were to attack Monsieur Roberge on his weak
point, he might relent.

Without a word to my comrades, I wrote a copy of Latin verses, taking
for my theme the sufferings of the caged bird, far from the country and
the woods, cut off from the bright sun and the free air, and plaintively
crying out for liberty. Good luck attended me--I suppose because my
object was so meritorious!

When we got back into school, I seized an opportunity, when Monsieur
Roberge's back was turned, to lay my little effusion on his desk. On
taking his seat he saw the paper, opened it, and began to read.

"Gentlemen," he said, "who wrote these lines?"

I held up my hand.

"They are extremely good," said he. Then, after a moment, "I cancel the
punishment inflicted on this class; you can thank your comrade Gounod
for earning your liberty by his good work."

Unnecessary to describe the civic honours showered on me in return.

At length I got into the second class, and found myself once again under
my beloved former master, Adolphe Régnier, who had taught me while I was
in the sixth.

Among my new comrades were Eugène Despois, afterwards a brilliant pupil
at the École Normale, and a well-known classic, Octave Ducros de Sixt,
and Albert Delacourtie, the high-minded and clever lawyer, still one of
my closest and most faithful friends. We four practically monopolised
the top places, the "Banc d'Honneur."

At Easter I was considered sufficiently advanced to warrant my being
transferred to the Rhetoric class;[2] but I only remained in it three
months, as my studies had been sufficiently satisfactory for my mother
finally to abandon her idea of extra classes.

I left the Lycée at the summer vacation, being then a little over
seventeen.

Still I had not passed through the Philosophy class, and my mother had
no intention of allowing me to leave my education incomplete. It was
therefore agreed and arranged that I was to go on working at home, and,
without interrupting my musical studies, to read for my Bachelor of Arts
degree, which I succeeded in taking within the year.

I have often regretted that I did not take a science degree as well. I
should thus have made acquaintance at an early age with many ideas whose
importance I only realised later in life, and my ignorance of which I
much regret. But time was running short. I had to set to work if I was
to win the Grand Prix de Rome, as I had promised; it was a matter of
life or death for my career. So there was not a moment to be lost.

Reicha being just dead, I was bereft of my instructor. The idea of
taking me to Cherubini, and asking him to put me into one of the
composition classes at the Conservatoire, struck my mother. I took some
of my exercise books under my arm, to give Cherubini some notion of what
Reicha had taught me. But he did not think fit to look at them. He
questioned me closely about my past, and as soon as he knew I had been a
pupil of Reicha's (although the latter had been a colleague of his at
the Conservatoire), he said to my mother--

"Very well; now he must begin all over again. I don't approve of
Reicha's style. He was a German, and this boy ought to follow the
Italian method. I shall put him under my pupil Halévy, to work at
counterpoint and fugue."

Cherubini's view was that the Italian school followed the only orthodox
system of music, as laid down by Palestrina, whereas the Germans look
upon Sebastian Bach as the high priest of harmony.

Far from being discouraged by this decision, I was only too delighted.

"All the better," said I to myself; and to my mother, later on, "It will
be great advantage to me. I can choose the best points of both the great
schools. It is all for the best."

I joined Halévy's class, and at the same time Cherubini put me into the
hands of Berton, the author of "Montano and Stéphanie," and a varied
collection of other works of high value, who was to instruct me in
lyrical composition.

Berton was a man of quick wit, kindly and refined. He was a great
admirer of Mozart, whose works he constantly recommended to the
attention of his old pupils.

"Study Mozart," he was always saying; "study the 'Nozze de Figaro!'"

He was quite right. That work should be every musician's text-book.
Mozart bears the same relation to Palestrina and Bach as the New
Testament bears to the Old, in Holy Writ.

When Berton died, as he did a couple of months after I joined his class,
Cherubini handed me over to Le Sueur, the composer of "Les Bardes," "La
Caverne," and of many masses and oratorios.

He was a man of grave and reserved character, but fervent and almost
biblical in inspiration, and devoted to sacred subjects. He looked like
an old patriarch, with his tall figure and waxen complexion.

Le Sueur received me with the greatest kindness, almost amounting to
paternal tenderness; he was very affectionate and warm-hearted. I was
only under him, I regret to say, for nine or ten months; but the period,
short as it was, was of incalculable benefit to me. The wise and
high-minded counsels he bestowed on me entitle him to an honoured place
in my memory and my grateful affection.

Under Halévy's guidance I re-learned the whole theory and practice of
counterpoint and fugue; but although I worked hard, and gained my
master's approval, I never won a prize at the Conservatoire. My one and
constant aim was that Grand Prix de Rome, which I had sworn to win at
any cost.

I was nearly nineteen when I first competed for it. I got the second
prize.

On the death of Le Sueur I continued to study under Paër, his successor
as Professor of Composition.

I tried again the following year. My poor mother was torn between hope
and fear. This time it must be either the Grand Prix or nothing! Alas!
it was the latter; and I was just twenty, the age when my military
service was due.

However, the fact of my having won the second prize the year before
entitled me to twelve months' grace, and gave me the chance of making a
third and last effort.

To make up for my disappointment, my mother took me for a month's tour
in Switzerland. She was as bright and active then, at eight-and-fifty,
as any other woman of thirty. As I had never been outside Paris, except
to Versailles, Rouen, and Havre, this tour was a dream of delight to me.
Geneva, Chamounix, the Oberland, the Righi, the Lakes, the journey home
by Bâle, successively claimed my admiration. We went through the whole
of Switzerland on mule-back, rising early, going late to rest; and my
mother was always up and ready dressed before she roused me.

I returned to Paris full of fresh zeal for my work, and quite determined
this time to carry off the Grand Prix de Rome.

At last the period of competition came round. I entered, and I won the
prize.

My poor mother wept for joy, first of all, but afterwards at the
thought that the first result of my triumph would be to separate us for
three weary years, two of which I should have to spend in Rome and one
in Germany. We had never been parted before, and now her daily life was
going to be like the story of the "Two Pigeons."

The winners of the other Grand Prizes of my year were Hébert for
painting, Gruyère for sculpture, Lefuel for architecture, and Vauthier
(grandson of Galle) for medal engraving.

Towards the end of October the different prizes were publicly awarded
with becoming solemnity. This ceremony was an annual function, one of
its features being the performance of the cantata which had won the
music prize. My brother, who was an architect, had highly distinguished
himself at the École des Beaux Arts under the teaching of Huyot. Whether
it was that he foresaw his younger brother would one day win a Grand
Prix, and consequently have to go abroad to study, I know not, but
Urbain utterly refused to compete for a similar honour himself. He did
not choose to leave a mother he adored, and of whom he was the prop and
support for five long years. But he did carry off a prize known as the
Departmental Prize, conferred on the student who has won the greatest
number of medals during his attendance at the École des Beaux Arts.

The winner of this prize was publicly named at a general sitting of the
Institute, and my proud mother had the satisfaction of seeing both her
sons honoured in the same day.

I have already mentioned that my brother was educated at the Versailles
Lycée. There he became acquainted with Lefuel, whose father was
architect at the Palace, and who was to live to add lustre to the name
he bore. They met again as fellow-pupils in the office of Huyot, one of
the architects of the Arc de Triomphe, and there became, and always
continued, the firmest of friends. Lefuel was nearly nine years older
than I. My mother, who loved him like her own son, urgently begged him
to look after me; and, in duty to the memory of my good old friend, I
chronicle the faithful care and watchfulness with which he performed his
trust.

       *       *       *       *       *

Before I started abroad I was offered a piece of work, considerable
enough at any age, but doubly so at mine. Dietsch, the chapel-master of
St. Eustache, who at that time was chorus-master at the Opera, said to
me one day--

"Why don't you write a mass before going to Rome? If you will compose
one, I will have it sung at St. Eustache."

A mass! of my composition! and at St. Eustache! I thought I must be
dreaming!

I had five months before me, so I set to work at once. Thanks to my
mother's industrious help in copying the orchestral parts (we were too
poor to afford a copyist), all was ready on the appointed day. A mass
with full orchestra--think of that!

I dedicated this work--over-boldly perhaps, but certainly with deep
gratitude--to the memory of my beloved and regretted master, Le Sueur,
and I myself conducted the performance at St. Eustache.

My mass, I readily admit, was a work of no very remarkable value. The
novice's inexperience in the art of handling an orchestra with all its
varied tints of sound, which needs so long a practical experience, was
all too apparent. As to the musical ideas my work contained, their value
was confined to a fairly clear conception of the sense of its sacred
subject, and a tolerably close harmony between that sense and the music
intended to illustrate it. But vigour of design and general outline were
sorely lacking.

However that may have been, this first attempt brought me much kind
encouragement; the following, for instance, which touched me specially.

Returning home with my mother after the performance of the mass, I found
a messenger with a note awaiting me at the door of our apartment (then
at 8 Rue de l'Éperon, on the ground floor). I opened the letter, and
read as follows:--

"Well done, young fellow, whom I remember as a child! All honour to your
'Gloria,' your 'Crédo,' and, above all, your 'Sanctus.' It is fine, it
is full of religious feeling! Well done, and many thanks! You have made
me very happy!"

It was from good Monsieur Poirson, my former Principal at Saint Louis,
then Principal of the Lycée Charlemagne. He had seen the announcement of
my mass, and had come with all speed to witness the first public
appearance of the young artist to whom he had said, seven years before,
"Go on, my boy; you _shall_ be a musician!"

I was so touched by his kindly thought, that I did not even wait to go
indoors. I rushed into the street, called a cab, and hurried to the
Lycée Charlemagne, in the Rue St. Antoine, where I found my dear old
Principal, who clasped me to his heart.

I had only four more days to spend with my mother before leaving her for
three years. She, poor woman, through her constant tears, was getting
everything ready against the day of my departure. Very soon it came.




II

_ITALY_


We left Paris, Lefuel and Vauthier and I, on December 5th, 1839, by the
mail-coach which started from the Rue Jean Jacques Rousseau.

My brother was the only person there to bid us farewell. Our first stage
took us to Lyons. Thence we followed the course of the Rhône, by
Avignon, Arles, &c., till we reached Marseilles.

At Marseilles we took a "vetturino."

"Vetturino!" What memories the word recalls! Alas for the poor old
travelling carriage long since shouldered out of existence, crushed and
smothered under the hurrying feet of the iron horse!

The good-natured old conveyance which one stopped at will, whenever one
wanted peacefully to admire those beautiful bits of scenery through or
mayhap underneath which the snorting steam horse, devouring space like
any meteor, now whisks you like a parcel! In those days men travelled
gradually, insensibly from one impression to another; now this railway
mortar fires us from Paris, in our sleep, to wake under some Eastern
sky. No imperceptible mental transition or climatic change! We are shot
out roughly, treated as a British merchant treats his merchandise. Close
packed like bales down in a hold, and delivered with all speed, like
fish sent on by express train to make sure of its arriving fresh! If
only progress, that remorseless conqueror, would even spare its victims'
lives! But no, the vetturino has departed utterly. Yet I bless his
memory. But for his aid, I should have never had the joy of seeing that
wonderful Corniche, the ideal introduction to the delicious climate and
the picturesque charms of Italy--Monaco, Mentone, Sestri, Genoa,
Spezzia, Trasimeno, Tuscany, Pisa, Lucca, Sienna, Perugia, Florence. A
progressive and many-sided education, Nature's explanation of the
existence of the great masters, while they in turn teach man to look at
Nature. For close on two happy months we dallied over all this
loveliness, leisurely tasting and enjoying it, till finally, on January
27th, 1840, we entered the great city which was to be our home, our
teacher, our initiator into the noblest and severest beauties of nature
and of art.

The Director of the French Academy at that time was Monsieur Ingres. He
had been one of my father's early friends. On our arrival, we called, as
in duty bound, to pay him our respects. As soon as he saw me he cried--

"You are Gounod, I am sure! Goodness! how like your father you are!"

He spoke of my father's talent as a draughtsman, of his kind
disposition, of his brilliant wit and conversational powers, with an
admiration which, coming as it did from the lips of so distinguished an
artist, constituted the most delightful welcome I could have had. Soon
we were established in our different quarters, consisting in each case
of a single large apartment, called a _Loggia_, which served alike as
bedroom and as studio.

My first thought was of the length of time which must elapse before I
saw my mother again. I wondered whether my work as an art student would
suffice to enable me to bear with any sort of patience a separation
which, between Rome and Germany, must cover quite three years.

Gazing from my window on the dome of St. Peter's in the distance, I
readily yielded to the melancholy aroused by my first taste of
solitude--though solitude is hardly a word applicable to this palace,
where twenty-two of us dwelt, and where we all met at least twice daily
at the common board, in that splendid dining-hall, the walls of which
are covered with the portraits of every student since the foundation of
the Academy. Besides, it was my nature to make friends quickly, and live
on excellent terms with those about me.

I must admit, too, that my low spirits were in great part due to my
first impressions of Rome itself. I was utterly disappointed. Instead of
the city of my dreams, majestic and imposing, full of ancient temples,
antique monuments, and picturesque ruins, I saw a mere provincial town,
vulgar, characterless, and, in most places, very dirty.

My disenchantment was complete, and it would have required but little
persuasion to make me throw up the sponge, pack my traps, and hurry back
to Paris and all I cared for as quickly as wheels could take me there.
As a matter of fact, Rome does possess all the beauties I had dreamt
of, but the eye of a new-comer cannot at first perceive them. They must
be sought out, felt for, here and there, until by slow degrees the
sleeping glories of the splendid past awake, and the dumb ruins and dry
bones arise once more to life before their patient student's eyes.

I was still too young, not only in years, but also and especially in
character, to grasp or understand at the first glance the deep
significance of the solemn, austere city, whose whisper is so low that
only ears accustomed to deep silence and sharpened by seclusion can
catch its tones. Rome is the echo of the Scriptural words of the Maker
of the human soul to His own handiwork: "I will bring her into the
wilderness, and speak comfortably to her." So various is she in herself,
and in such deep calm is everything about her lapped, that no conception
of her immense _ensemble_ and prodigious wealth of treasures is possible
at first. The Past, the Present, and the Future alike crown her the
capital not of Italy only, but of the human race in general. This fact
is recognised by all who have lived there long; for whatever the country
whence the wanderer comes, whatever tongue he speaks, Rome has a
universal language understood by all, so that the thoughtful traveller,
leaving her, feels he leaves home behind him.

Little by little I felt my low spirits evaporate and a new feeling take
their place. I began to know Rome better, and cast aside the
winding-sheet which had enwrapped me, as it were. But even up to this I
had not been living in downright idleness.

My favourite amusement was reading Goethe's "Faust," in French of
course, as I knew no German. I read too, with great interest,
"Lamartine's Poems." Before I began to think about sending home my first
batch of work, for which I still had plenty of time before me, I busied
myself in composing a number of melodies, among others "Le Vallon" and
also "Le Soir," the music of which I incorporated ten years afterwards
into a scene in the first act of my opera "Sappho," to the beautiful
lines written by my dear friend and famous colleague, Emile Augier,
"Héro sur la tour solitaire."

I wrote both these songs at a few days' interval, almost as soon as I
arrived at the Villa Medecis.

Six weeks or so slipped away. My eyes had grown accustomed to the
silent city, which at first had seemed so like a desert to me. The very
silence ended by having its own charm, by becoming an actual pleasure to
me; and I took particular delight in roaming about the Forum, the ruins
of the Palatine Hill, and the Coliseum, those glorious relics of a power
and splendour departed, which have rested now for centuries under the
august and peaceful rule of the universal Shepherd, and the Empress city
of the world.

A very worthy and pleasant family of the name of Desgoffe was at that
time staying with Monsieur and Madame Ingres. I had made their
acquaintance, and gradually became very intimate with them. Alexandre
Desgoffe was not an Academy student like myself, but a private pupil of
Monsieur Ingres, and a very fine landscape painter. Yet he lived in the
Academy buildings with his wife and daughter, a charming child of nine,
who afterwards became Madame Paul Flandrin, and retained as a wife and
mother the sweetness which characterised her girlhood. Desgoffe himself
was a man in ten thousand; downright and honest, modest and unselfish,
simple and pure-minded as a child, the kindest and most faithful soul
on earth. It may easily be guessed that my mother was very glad to learn
that I had such good people near me to show me true affection, and not
only comfort my loneliness, but, if necessary, give me kind and devoted
care.

We students always spent our Sunday evenings in the Director's
drawing-room, to which we had the right of _entrée_ on that day.
Generally there was music. Monsieur Ingres had taken a fancy to me, and
he was music mad. He particularly affected Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and
above all Gluck, whose noble style, with its touch of pathos, stamped
him in his mind as something of the ancient Greek, a worthy scion of
Æschylus, of Sophocles, or Euripides.

Monsieur Ingres played the violin. He was no finished performer, still
less was he an artist; but in his youth he had played in the orchestra
of his native town, Montauban, and taken part in the performance of
Gluck's operas.

I had read and studied the German composer's works. As to Mozart's "Don
Giovanni," I knew it all by heart; so, although not a very good pianist,
I was quite up to treating Monsieur Ingres to recollections of his
favourite score.

Beethoven's symphonies I knew by heart, too, and these he passionately
admired; we often spent the greater part of the night deep in talk over
the great master's works, and before long I stood high in his good
graces.

Nobody who was not intimately acquainted with Monsieur Ingres can have
any correct idea of what he really was. I lived in close familiarity
with him for some considerable time, and I can testify to the
simplicity, uprightness, and frankness of his nature. He was full of
candour and of noble impulse, enthusiastic, even eloquent at times. He
could be as tender and gentle as a child, and then again he would pour
out a torrent of apostolic wrath. His unaffectedness and sensitive
delicacy were touching, and there was a freshness of feeling about the
man which has never yet been found in any _poseur_, as some people have
elected to call him.

Humble and modest in the presence of a master-mind, he stood up proudly
and boldly against foolish arrogance and self-sufficiency. He was
fatherly in his treatment of his students, whom he looked on as his
children, giving each his appointed rank with jealous care, whatever
that of the visitors in his drawing-room might be. Such were the
characteristics of the excellent noble-minded artist, whose invaluable
tuition I was about to have the good fortune of receiving.

I was deeply attached to him, and I shall always remember his dropping
in my hearing one or two of those luminous sentences which, when
properly understood, cast so much light upon the artistic life. Every
one knows that famous saying of his, "Drawing is the honesty of art." He
said another thing before me once, which is a perfect volume in itself,
"There is no grace where there is no strength." True, indeed! for grace
and strength are the two complementary constituents of perfect beauty.
Strength saves grace from degenerating into mere wanton charm, while
grace purifies strength from all its coarseness and brutality--the
perfect harmony of the two thus marking the highest level art can reach,
and giving it the stamp of genius.

It has been said and frequently repeated, parrot-wise, that Monsieur
Ingres was intolerant and exclusive. That is utterly untrue. If he had a
way of imposing his opinions, it was because of his intense belief--the
surest means of influencing others. I never knew any one with such a
power of universal admiration, simply because he knew better than most
what to admire, and wherein beauty lay. But he was discreet. He knew
full well how prone youthful enthusiasm is to fall down and worship
unreasoningly before the personal peculiarities of an artist or
composer. He knew these same peculiarities--which are, as it were, the
individual characteristics and facial features whereby we recognise
them, as we recognise each other--are, for that very reason, the most
incommunicable qualities about them, and thence he deduced the fact,
first, that any imitation of them amounts to plagiarism, and, further,
that such imitation must infallibly end in exaggeration, degenerating
into absolute artistic vice.

This explanation of Monsieur Ingres's real character will partially
account for the unjust accusation of intolerance and exclusiveness
levelled against him.

The following anecdote proves how loyally he could abandon a hastily
formed opinion, and how little obstinacy there was about any dislike he
might chance to take.

I had just sung him that wonderful scene of "Charon and the Shades" from
"Alcestis;" not Gluck's "Alcestis," but Lulli's. It was the first time
he had heard it, and his primary impression was that the music was
hard, dry, and stern. So much did he dislike it that he cried, "It's
horrible! It's dreadful! It isn't music at all! It's iron!"

Young and inexperienced as I felt myself to be, I naturally refrained
from arguing the point with a man I held in such profound respect, so I
waited till the storm blew over. Some time after, Monsieur Ingres
referred again to his first impression of this work, an impression which
I believe had already undergone some change, and said--

"By the bye! that scene of Lulli's 'Charon and the Shades'--I should
like to hear it again."

I sang it over to him once more; and this time, more accustomed no doubt
to that striking composer's rugged and uneven style, he grasped the
irony and banter in Charon's part, and the plaintive pleadings of the
wandering Shades, who cannot get across the river, not having
wherewithal to pay the ferryman.

By degrees he got so fond of the scene that it became one of his
favourites, and I was often called upon to sing it.

But his prime favourite was Mozart's "Don Giovanni," over which we often
sat till two in the morning. Poor Madame Ingres, dropping with sleep,
used to be driven to locking up the piano and sending us off to our
respective beds. Although he preferred German music, and had no
particular affection for Rossini, he considered the "Barbiere" as a
masterpiece. He had the highest admiration, too, for another Italian
maistro, Cherubini, of whom he has left such a magnificent portrait, and
whom Beethoven held to be the first musician of his age; no slight
praise from such a man. Well, we all have our tastes; why should not
Monsieur Ingres have his? To prefer one thing does not involve
condemning everything else.

A chance incident brought me into closer and more frequent intercourse
with Monsieur Ingres. Being very fond of drawing, I used often to carry
a sketch-book with me in my expeditions about Rome. One day coming back
from a stroll, I came face to face with Monsieur Ingres at the door of
the Academy. He caught sight of the sketch-book under my arm, and with
that bright and piercing glance of his, he said--

"What's that under your arm?"

I was rather confused, and made answer, "Why, Monsieur Ingres, it's
a--it's a sketch-book."

"A sketch-book! What for? Do you know how to draw?"

"Oh, Monsieur Ingres, no--I mean--yes--I can draw a little--but only a
very little."

"Is that so? Come, show me your book." He opened it, and came across a
little sketch of St. Catherine, which I had just copied from a fresco
said to be by Masaccio, in the old basilica of St. Clement, not far from
the Coliseum.

"Did you do this?" said Monsieur Ingres.

"Yes, sir."

"Alone?"

"Yes, sir."

"But--do you know you draw like your father?"

"Oh, Monsieur Ingres!"

Then he added, looking at me gravely--

"You must do some tracings for me."

Make tracings for Monsieur Ingres! work beside him, perhaps! Bask in the
sunshine of his talent! Warm myself in the glow of his enthusiasm! The
thought transported me with joy.

So every evening we worked side by side in the lamplight at this most
interesting occupation, I drawing as much profit from the study of the
masterpieces over which my careful pencil passed as from Monsieur
Ingres's delightful conversation.

I made about a hundred tracings for him of original prints, which I am
proud to think found place in his portfolios, and some of which were not
less than eighteen inches high.

One day Monsieur Ingres said to me, "If you like I will get you back to
Rome with the Grand Prix for painting."

"Oh, Monsieur Ingres!" I answered, "I could not give up my career and
take up a new one. Besides, I could never leave my mother a second
time."

However, as after all it was music I had come to Rome to study and not
painting, it behoved me to seriously seek for opportunities of hearing
some. Such opportunities were not exactly numerous, and, it must be
confessed, not particularly profitable nor useful either. In the first
place, as regarded religious music, the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican
was the only place where it was possible to hear anything decent, to say
nothing of its being instructive. What they called music in the other
churches was enough to make one shiver! Except in the Sistine Chapel,
and in that called the "Canon's Chapel" in St. Peter's, the music was
not merely worthless, it was vile. It is hard to imagine how such a
chamber of horrors could ever have come to be offered up to the glory of
God within those sacred walls. All the shabbiest tinsel and trappings of
secular music passed across the trestles of this religious masquerade.
So no wonder I never tried it twice.

I generally went on Sundays to the musical mass at the Sistine Chapel,
often in the company of my friend and comrade Hébert.

But the Sistine! How shall I describe it as it deserves? That is a task
more appropriate to the authors of what we see and hear there, or rather
of what was heard there formerly. For if the sublime though, alas!
perishable work of Michael Angelo the immortal, already sorely damaged,
is still to be seen, the hymns of the divine Palestrina no longer
resound under those vaulted roofs, struck dumb by the political
captivity of the Sovereign Pontiff, the lack of whose sacred presence
their empty recesses seem so bitterly to mourn.

I went then to the Sistine, as often as I possibly could. The severe,
ascetic music, level and calm like an ocean horizon, serene even to
monotony, anti-sensuous, and yet so intense in its fervour of religious
contemplation as sometimes to rise to ecstasy, had a strange, almost a
disagreeable effect on me at first.

Whether it was the actual style of composition, then quite new to
me--the distinctive sonority of those peculiar voices, now heard for the
first time--or the firm, almost harsh attack, the strong accentuation
which gives such a startling effect to the general execution of the
score, by the way it marks the opening of each vocal part in the closely
woven web of sound--I know not. The first impression, unpleasant as it
was, did not dismay me. I returned again and again, until at last I
could not stay away.

There are certain works which ought to be seen or heard in the place for
which they were written. The Sistine Chapel, which stands unique upon
the earth, is one of the spots in question. The Genius who decorated
roof and altar-screen with his marvellous conceptions of the Genesis and
the Last Judgment, this painter of the prophets, himself a prophet in
his art, will doubtless be as eternally unmatched as even Homer or
Phidias. Men of that power and stature never have their equals. Each is
a being apart from every other. Each grasps a world of thought, exhausts
it, closes the book, and that which he has said, no man can ever say
again.

Palestrina gives, as it were, the musical translation of Michael
Angelo's great poem. I believe the two masters cast a mutual light on
our intelligence. The eyes' delight sharpens the oral comprehension, and
_vice versâ_, so that one ends by wondering whether the Sistine, with
its music and its painting, is not the fruit of one and the same
artistic inspiration? Both are so perfectly and sublimely blended as to
appear the double expression of one thought--a single chant sung with a
twofold voice--the music in the air a kind of echo of the beauty which
enchants the eye.

Between the masterpieces of Michael Angelo and Palestrina such close
analogy of thought, such kinship of expression exist, that one is almost
forced to recognise the identity of the talents--I had almost said the
virtues--which each master-mind displays. Both have the same simplicity,
even humility of manner; the same seeming indifference to effect, the
same scorn for methods of seduction. There is nothing artificial or
mechanical about them; the Soul, wrapped in ecstatic contemplation of a
higher world, describes in humble and submissive language the sublime
visions that pass before its eyes.

Even the very character and colour of the music and painting in question
seem to indicate a deliberate renunciation. The art of the two masters
is a sort of sacrament, whose outward and visible sign is but a
transparent veil stretched between man and the divine and living Truth.
Wherefore neither of the two mighty artists attract at the first blush.

Generally speaking, exterior glitter is what charms the eye; but here we
have none of that. All the treasure lies beneath the surface. The
impression produced on the mind by one of Palestrina's works is much the
same as that given by one of Bossuet's most eloquent pages. There is no
specially striking detail, apparently, yet one is lifted into a higher
atmosphere. Language, the obedient and faithful exponent of thought,
leads the mind gently onward, without any temptation to turn aside until
the goal is reached and you are on the upper summit, led by a mysterious
guide, gentle, unwavering, unswerving, who hides the mark of his
footsteps, and leaves no trace behind.

It is this absence of visible effort, of worldly trick, and of conceited
affectation which makes the greatest works so unapproachable. The
intellect which conceives them, and the raptures they express, are alike
indispensable to their production.

But what shall I say of the prodigious, the gigantic talent of Michael
Angelo! The amount of genius he heaped up and lavished, both as a
painter and a poet, on the walls of this unique building, is beyond
anything man can measure.

What a masterly grouping of the events and personages which sum up and
symbolise the whole essential history of the human race! What a
wonderful conception is that double row of prophets and sibyls, those
seers of either sex, whose gaze pierces the darkness of the future, and
in whose persons the omniscient Spirit is carried through the ages! What
a volume of teaching is that vaulted ceiling covered with the pictured
story of our human origin, and whereon the colossal figure of the
prophet Jonah, cast out of the belly of the whale, is linked with the
triumph of that other Jonah, snatched by the power of His own might out
of the darkness of the tomb, and victorious over death itself!

What a sublime and gorgeous Hosanna seems to rise from the legion of
angels twisting, as it were, and wreathed in ecstasy about the sacred
instruments of His Passion as they bear them across the luminous sky,
right up into the highest places of the heavenly glory; while in the
lower spaces of the picture the cohorts of the lost stand out, gloomy
and despairing, against the last livid gleams of a light that seems to
bid them farewell to all eternity. And on the vault itself again, what
an eloquent and pathetic reproduction do we see of our first parents'
early days! What a revelation in that tremendous creative gesture, which
gives the "living soul" to the inanimate image of the first man, thus
putting him in conscious relation with the principle of his being! What
a sense of spiritual power in the empty space, so significant in its
very narrowness, left by the painter between the finger of the Creator
and the form of the creature; as though he would bid us mark that the
Divine will knows neither distance nor impediment, and that for the
Deity desire and accomplishment are but one act.

What beauty in the submissive attitude of the first woman, drawn from
Adam's side in his deep slumber, as she stands for the first time before
her Creator and Father! How wonderful is the transport of filial
confidence and passionate gratitude in which she bends before the Hand
which beckons, and blesses her, with such calm and sovereign tenderness!

But even were I to pause at every step, I could touch no more than the
fringe of this wondrous poem, the vastness of which fairly turns one
giddy. This huge collection of biblical pictures might almost be called
the Bible of the art of painting. Ah! if young people only guessed what
an education for their intelligence, what mental pabulum for all their
future, this sanctuary of the Sistine Chapel holds, they would spend
their days in drinking in its lessons. Characters formed in such a noble
school of fervour and contemplation will soar far above any
self-interest or regard for notoriety.

It was my duty to study opera, as well the sacred music of which the
services in the Pontifical Chapel preserved the best traditions. The
operatic repertoire at that date consisted mostly of works by Bellini,
Donizetti, and Mercadante. All these, though full of characteristic
qualities, and even marked from time to time by the personal inspiration
of their authors, were, as their general outline and _ensemble_ will
prove, little more than parasitic creepers round that vigorous trunk,
the genius of Rossini. Neither its vigorous strength nor its majestic
stature were theirs, yet it was often hidden, for the time being, under
the passing splendour of their ephemeral foliage.

There was but little advantage, from a musical point of view, in
listening to these operas. The performances were very inferior to those
at the Théâtre Italien in Paris, where the same works were interpreted
by the best artists of the day. The stage-management, too, was often
literally grotesque. I remember going to a performance of "Norma," at
the Apollo Theatre in Rome, at which the Roman warriors wore firemen's
helmets and tunics, and yellow nankeen trousers with cherry-coloured
stripes. It was utterly ridiculous, and might have been a Punch and Judy
show.

Consequently I did not patronise the theatre much, and found I did far
better to study my favourite scores--Lulli's "Alcestis," Gluck's
"Iphigenia," Mozart's "Don Giovanni," Rossini's "William Tell"--in my
own rooms.

Over and above the time I spent in close companionship with Monsieur
Ingres during the famous "tracing" period, I had the good luck to get
his leave to watch him in his studio. It may be imagined I made the most
of the permission. I used to read to him while he was painting, and many
a time have I dropped my book and watched him at his work. Thus I had
the good fortune to see him resume and finish his exquisite picture
"Stratonice," which was acquired by the Duc d'Orléans, and also his
"Vierge à l'Hostie," intended for Count Demidoff's gallery.

An interesting incident, of which I was an eye-witness, occurred in
connection with this latter picture. In the original composition, the
foreground contained, instead of the Pyx with the holy elements, an
exquisite figure of the Holy Child lying asleep on a cushion, one hand
still holding the tassel with which it had been playing. The exquisite
little creature, with its tender plump body, was (or, at all events,
seemed to me) a perfect gem, not only in ease and beauty of attitude,
but in grace of drawing and charm of colour.

Monsieur Ingres himself appeared pleased with it, and when the waning
daylight forced him to stop painting, I left him well content with his
day's work. Next afternoon I went back to the studio, and, to my
horror, the figure was gone! He had destroyed the whole of his work, and
removed every trace of it with the palette-knife.

"Oh, Monsieur Ingres!" I cried in dismay.

"Well, yes," he said; and then again decisively, "Yes, I was right!"

The glory of the divine symbol had come to him as something higher than
the bright human reality of the infant figure, and therefore more worthy
of the Virgin's adoration of her Son. He had not shrunk from sacrificing
a masterpiece to truth.

This noble choice, this disinterested integrity, stamp him as one of
those whose privilege and reward it is to enjoy unquestioned authority
as a guide and teacher of man.

       *       *       *       *       *

Among my contemporaries at the Académie de France at Rome were a number
of young fellows who have grown famous since those days, among them
Lefuel, Hébert, and Ballu the architect, all of them members of the
Institut de France at this present time, as well as many others who have
either gained distinction or been snatched away by an early death before
they could realise their country's hopes. I will instance Papety the
painter, Octave Blanchard, Buttura, Lebouy, Brisset, Pils, the sculptors
Diébolt and Godde, the musicians Georges Bousquet and Aimé Maillard--all
of them sons of that much-abused Alma Mater which, in succession to
Hyppolyte Flandrin and Ambroise Thomas, produced Cabanel, Victor Massé,
Guillaume, Cavelier, Georges Bizet, Baudry, Massenet, and a host of
other eminent artists whose names I might add to this list, already long
enough, in all conscience.

We students were often asked to parties at the French Embassy. It was
there I met Gaston de Ségur for the first time. He was then an attaché,
but, as everybody knows, he afterwards became the saintliest of bishops,
and, as I thankfully recollect, one of my best and dearest friends.

Though our headquarters were at Rome, we were allowed and expected to
travel about and visit other parts of Italy.

I shall never forget the impression Naples made on me on my first
arrival with my comrade, Georges Bousquet, now no more. He had won the
Grand Prix for music the year before. We had travelled with the Marquis
Amédée de Pastoret, who had written the words of the cantata which had
won my prize for me.

It all seemed to me like a vision or a fairy tale. The bewitching
climate, which sets one a dreaming of Grecian skies; the sapphire bay,
set in its frame of isles and mountains, whose slopes and peaks glow in
the sunset with tints so magic and ever changing, that the rarest stuffs
and brightest jewels are colourless and dull beside them. All around one
the endless wonders of Vesuvius, Portici, Castellamare, Sorrento,
Pompeii, and Herculaneum, of Ischia, Capri, and Posilipo, Amalfi and
Salerno; and Pæstum, with its splendid Doric temples, once lapped by the
blue waters of the Mediterranean.

It was the absolute reverse of the effect produced by the first sight of
Rome! Here the charm was instantaneous.

When to all these natural fascinations we add the interest attaching to
the museum (the "Studii" or Museo Borbonico), crammed with a unique
collection of masterpieces of antique art unearthed for the most part at
Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Nola--cities which lay buried for more than
eighteen centuries beneath the lava of Vesuvius--the immense attraction
this city presents to any artist may be conceived.

I was lucky enough to visit Naples thrice during my residence in Rome,
and among the most vivid and striking recollections I took away with me
was my memory of beautiful Capri, so wild and yet so smiling, with its
rugged rocks and verdant slopes.

It was summer time when I first went there, under brilliant sunshine and
in torrid heat. The only possible way of existing in the daytime was
either to shut oneself up in one's room and try to get a little coolness
and sleep in the dark, or else to jump into the sea and stay there,
which I was always delighted to do. The beauty of the night in such a
climate, and at that season, is well-nigh unimaginable. The vault of
heaven literally quivers with stars like an ocean with waves of light,
so full does infinite space appear of twinkling tremulous luminaries.
During my fortnight's stay I often sat listening to the eloquent silence
of these phosphorescent nights. I would perch myself on some steep rock,
and stay for hours gazing out on the horizon, rolling a big stone down
the precipitous slope from time to time, to hear it bound and bound till
it struck the sea below and raised a ruffle of foam. Now and again a
solitary night-bird uttered its mournful note, and made me think of
those weird precipices whose horror Weber has rendered with such
marvellous power in that immortal incantation scene in "Der Freischütz."

It was during one of these nocturnal rambles that the first idea for the
"Walpurgis Night" in Goethe's "Faust" struck me.

I never parted with the score; I carried it about with me everywhere,
and jotted down in stray notes any idea which I thought might be useful
whenever I made an attempt to use the subject for an opera. This I did
not attempt until seventeen years afterwards.

However, back to Rome and to the Academy I had to go. Pleasant and
seductive as Naples was, I never stopped there for any length of time
without wanting to get back to Rome. A kind of home-sickness would seize
me, and I would leave without a shadow of regret the spot where I had
spent so many happy hours. In point of fact, and in spite of all her
splendour and prestige, Naples is a noisy, shrill-voiced town, restless
and riotous. Her inhabitants squabble and talk and quarrel and argue
from dawn till dark, and from dark till dawn, on those quays of hers,
where rest and silence are equally unknown. Wrangling is the normal
condition of the Neapolitan. You are fallen upon, besieged, haunted by
the indefatigable persecutions of _facchini_, shopkeepers, drivers, and
boatmen, who would think but little of carrying you off by force, and
every one of whom offers to serve you for less money than his fellow.[3]

Once back in Rome, I set seriously to work. This was in the autumn of
1840.

In spite of her professional duties, which engaged her on week-days from
morn till night, my mother still found time to write to me often and
fully. She must frequently have cut short her hours of sleep so as to
give me this proof of her constant and tender care. The very length of
her letters bore sufficient witness to the amount of time, robbed from
her nightly rest, she had devoted to them. I knew she had to rise every
morning at five, to be ready for her first pupil, who came at six, and
that often her breakfast hour was absorbed by another lesson, during
which, instead of a proper meal, she would swallow a bowl of soup, or
perhaps take nothing but a crust of bread and a glass of wine and water.
I knew her daily round lasted till six o'clock every evening, and that
after her dinner she had a hundred and one household duties to attend
to. Besides, she had many people to write to as well as me, and, what is
more, she was a Dame de Charité, and often worked with her own hands to
clothe her poor. Nothing but the complete orderliness and method with
which she laid out her time could ever have enabled her to do so much;
but those two essential and fundamental qualities, without which life
can be neither occupied nor useful, were hers in the highest degree.

But she had quite given up that pestilential habit of "paying visits,"
which simply means wasting one's time from Monday morning to Saturday
night in going to other people's houses and wasting theirs; _killing_
that time, in fact, which kills those who misuse it with sheer
weariness.

And so we were brought up on short but pithy maxims, flung to us, as it
were, with the brevity of a woman who could not spare time to chatter.
"Waste not, want not," and so forth.

A family friend once said to me, "Your mother is not one wonder to me,
but two; I cannot conceive how she finds time to do so much, or all the
money she gives away." _I_ know well enough how she found both. In her
own good sense and powerful will. The more she had to do, the more she
did. Just the converse of Emile Augier's clever saying, which has much
the same meaning, "I have been so idle, I haven't had time to do a
single thing."

Now and again my dear excellent brother would slip a word of good and
friendly advice into my mother's letters to me. I stood much in need of
it, for steadiness was never my strong point, I fear; and weakness,
uncounterbalanced by good sense, becomes a power for evil. Alas! I know
too well how little I profited by all his warnings, and I cry, _Mea
culpa_.

There is a church in the Corso at Rome, called San Luigi dei Francesi,
and served by a French canon and priests. Every year, on the 1st of May
(the feast of the patron saint of Louis-Philippe), a musical Mass was
performed there. The duty of writing the music for the occasion devolved
on the Academy musical prize-holder for the previous year. The year I
went to Rome, the Mass (with full orchestral accompaniment) was written
by my comrade, Georges Bousquet. The following one, it would be my turn.
My mother, fearing my other duties at the Academy would not allow me
sufficient leisure to compose so important a work, sent me the Mass I
had written for St. Eustache. She had copied it herself from my
manuscript score, not caring to let that out of her own keeping or risk
losing it in the post.

My feelings when this fresh token of my mother's goodness and patience
reached me at Rome may easily be imagined. However, I did not do what
she suggested, for I considered it my bounden duty, as a conscientious
artist, to try and do still better work (no difficult matter, indeed),
and I worked on stoutly at the new Mass I had begun composing for the
King's fête-day. I finished it in due course, and conducted it myself.

This work brought me luck, and earned me the kindest of congratulations.
To it I owe my life appointment of "Honorary Chapel-master" to the
Church of San Luigi dei Francesi. Little did I foresee I should be asked
to give a performance of the work and conduct it in person the very next
year in Germany. Later on I will detail the consequences of this second
performance, and the benefits it brought me.[4]

The longer I stayed at Rome, the more irresistible I found the mystic
charm and matchless calm that reign within its walls.

Coming from the jagged, bold volcanic outline of the crater of Naples,
the simple, quiet, solemn lines of the Campagna, framed by the Alban,
the Latian, and the Sabine hills, Soracte the majestic, the mountains of
Viterbo, Monte Mario, and Janiculum, made me think of some open-air
cloister, quiet and serene. The village of Nemi, with its pretty lake
sunk in a great crater, and fringed with luxuriant vegetation, was one
of my favourite spots near Rome. The walk round the lake by the upper
road is one of the most beautiful that can possibly be imagined. I shall
never forget the beauty of that view, as I had the good luck to see it
one lovely day, at the close of which I watched the sun go down into the
sea from the heights of Gensano.

But the neighbourhood of Rome abounds in such exquisite scenes, objects
of endless pleasure trips for travellers and tourists--Tivoli, Subiaco,
Frascati, Albano, Ariccia, and a hundred other places, the happy hunting
grounds of landscape painters, not to mention the Tiber, many spots on
the banks of which are full of majestic beauty and grandeur.

       *       *       *       *       *

In this memoir of my youthful days, I must not omit to mention, among
the artistic treasures which are Rome's special glory, a set of
masterpieces which share with the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel the
proud boast of being the glory of the Vatican. I mean those immortal
pictures by the painter Raphael, forming the collection known as "Le
Loggie e le Stanze." In the Stanza della Segnatura hang the immortal
canvases of the "School of Athens" and the "Disputa del Sacramento."
These two masterpieces, like many others from this unrivalled painter's
brush, are of a beauty which appears absolutely unapproachable.

Yet so irresistible is the ascendency of genius, that this Raphael, this
matchless painter whom history has set on the very pinnacle of fame, was
himself influenced by Michael Angelo. He felt the mighty Titan's grip,
he bowed before the giant's power, and his later works give ocular proof
of the homage he paid the sublime and almost supernatural genius that
dwelt within that powerful and gigantic brain.

Raphael may be the first of painters--Michael Angelo stands alone. In
Raphael's case, power expands and blossoms into charm; in Michael
Angelo's, on the other hand, charm seems to subjugate and govern power.
Raphael enraptures and captivates, while Michael Angelo fascinates and
overwhelms. One paints the earthly paradise; the other, like the
prisoner of Patmos, gazes with eagle eye even into the recesses of the
bright abode of the Archangels and the Seraphim.

These two great apostles would seem to have been called to stand side by
side in the high noontide of art, so that the calm and perfect beauty of
the younger might serve to temper the dazzling splendour revealed to the
poet-painter of the Apocalypse.

A detailed description of the innumerable art treasures of Rome would be
out of place in these recollections, of which the sole object has been
to relate the principal incidents of my early artistic career.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the winter of 1840-41 I had the privilege of seeing and hearing the
sister of Madame Malibran, Pauline Garcia, who had just married Louis
Viardot, then Director of the Théâtre Italien in Paris; they were, in
fact, on their honeymoon.

She was not yet eighteen, and her first appearance on the boards had
been a great success. I had the honour and pleasure, in the drawing-room
at the Academy, of accompanying her performance of the well-known and
immortal air from "Robin Hood." I was amazed by the already majestic
talent of this mere child, who then promised to be, and eventually
became, a great celebrity.

I did not meet her again until ten years later. It is a curious fact,
that at the age of twelve, when I first heard Malibran sing in Rossini's
"Otello," I made up my mind to embrace a musical career; _ten_ years
later, when I was twenty-two, I made the acquaintance of her sister,
Madame Viardot; _ten_ years later again, when I was thirty-two, I wrote
the part of "Sappho," which she created with such brilliant success on
the operatic stage, for the same lady.

That same winter I had the good fortune to meet Fanny Henzel,
Mendelssohn's sister. She was spending the winter at Rome with her
husband, who was painter to the Prussian court, and her son, who was
still a young child.

Madame Henzel was a first-rate musician--a very clever pianiste,
physically small and delicate, but her deep eyes and eager glance
betrayed an active mind and restless energy. She had rare powers of
composition, and many of the "Songs without Words," published among the
works and under the name of her brother, were hers.

Monsieur and Madame Henzel often came to the "Sunday evenings" at the
Academy, and she would sit down to the piano with the readiness and
simplicity of one who played because she loved it. Thanks to her great
gifts and wonderful memory, I made the acquaintance of various
masterpieces of German music which I had never heard before, among them
a number of the works of Sebastian Bach--sonatas, fugues, preludes, and
concertos--and many of Mendelssohn's compositions, which were like a
glimpse of a new world to me.

Monsieur and Madame Henzel left Rome to return to Berlin, and there I
met them again two years later.

       *       *       *       *       *

Before he left the Academy, Monsieur Ingres was good enough to make me
a parting gift, which I value both as a proof of his regard and as a
specimen of his talent. He did a pencil portrait of me, sitting at the
piano with Mozart's "Don Giovanni" open before me.

I was deeply conscious of the loss his departure would be to me, and of
how much I should miss the healthy influence of an instructor whose
artistic faith was so strong, whose enthusiasm was so infectious, and
whose teaching was so trustworthy and aimed so high. Every art demands
something beyond mere technical knowledge and special handicraft, beyond
the fullest, nay, the most absolutely perfect acquaintance with and
practice in the various processes. These are absolutely necessary, of
course, but they are only the tools with which the artist works, the
outward form and envelopment of each particular branch. But in each art
there is a something, the exclusive property of none, still common to
them all, higher than all, in default of which they fall to the level of
mere handicrafts. This something, which, itself unseen, imbues the whole
with life and soul--this constitutes the art itself.

Art is one of the three great transformations which reality, brought
into contact with the human mind, and looked at in the ideal and
all-powerful light of the good, the beautiful, and the true, is bound to
undergo. Art is neither an utter dream nor an exact copy; it is neither
the mere ideal nor the merely real. It is like man himself--the meeting
and fusion of the two. It is unity in duality. Inasmuch as it is ideal,
it soars above us. Were it only real, it would be below us. Morality is
the humanisation, the incarnation of good; science is that of truth, and
art is that of beauty.

And Monsieur Ingres was a true apostle of the beautiful. It was the
breath of his nostrils; his lectures proved it as well as his
works--more so indeed, perhaps; for, as a man with a strong creed is
generally a man full of great longings, the very fervour of those
aspirations will often carry him far above the ordinary beaten track.
From the heights thus gained he shed as much light on a musician's as on
a painter's work, ushering us all into the presence of the universal
sources of the highest truths. By showing me the real nature of true
art, he taught me more about my own than any number of merely technical
masters could have done.

Though time allowed of my deriving but little benefit from our
invaluable intercourse, yet that little made a permanent impression on
me, and left a precious memory to console me for the loss of his actual
presence.

In the month of April 1841, Monsieur Ingres was succeeded by Monsieur
Schnetz, a well-known painter, whose success and popularity were mostly
earned by his qualities of feeling and expression. He was a kind and
amiable man, full of mother-wit, very cheerful and cordial with the
students. In spite of a pair of bushy black eyebrows, which lost
themselves in a thick head of hair and almost concealed his forehead,
Monsieur Schnetz's expression was gentle and good-humoured, and he was
the essence of a thoroughly "good fellow."

My second and third years at the Academy were spent under his rule. He
was very fond of Rome, and circumstances helped him to indulge his
preference, for he was Director of the Academy of France three times,
and left none but kindly memories behind him.

By rights my residence in Rome should have ended with the year 1841, but
I could not make up my mind to depart, and obtained the Director's
permission to prolong my stay. I remained at the Academy five months
beyond the regulation period, and did not leave it until forced to move
by the fact that the state of my finances only barely permitted my
getting on to Vienna, where the money for the first six months of the
third year of my scholarship was to be remitted to me.

I will not attempt to describe my grief at quitting the Academy, at
parting with my beloved fellow-students, and leaving Rome itself, where
I felt my affections were so deeply rooted. My comrades accompanied me
as far as Ponte Molle (Pons Milvius), and after the most cordial of
farewells, I climbed into the post-cart which was to tear me (there is
no other word) from my two happy years in that land of promise.

I should have been less down-hearted had I been going straight home to
my beloved mother and brother, but I was faring alone into a country of
strangers, of whose very language I was utterly ignorant; no wonder the
outlook was cheerless and dark to me. As long as I could see it from the
road, I kept my eyes on the dome of St. Peter's--the crown of Rome and
of the universe--then the hills hid it utterly. I fell into deepest
musing, and wept like any child.


LETTERS


I

MONSIEUR LEFUEL, Artist, _Poste Restante, Nice-maritime_.

ROME, _21st June, Monday_.


DEAR GOOD FRIEND,--As it is much more natural and proper for a child to
hasten to answer his father, than a father his child, I will begin by
apologising for not having sooner acknowledged your last letter dated
from Mantua. But it has been in spite of myself, I do assure you. I have
had a great deal of writing to do lately, and it is not finished even
yet. It is really quite a business (and something else as well) to have
to thank people in writing for an interest they merely express through a
third person, and which you cannot acknowledge in the same coin.
However, I ought to be thankful, and I must not turn up my nose at the
idea of bestirring myself a little. Otherwise people might say, "Well,
it's easy enough to rid him of that trouble." Eh, dear boy? So I confide
this to nobody but yourself and trusted friends like you.

Let me tell you I have done your commission about that coat of yours,
which we had been wandering round and round for ever so long, "getting
hot," as they say at hide and seek. It has seen daylight at last, and is
none the worse; no ugly creases, nor moth of any sort. Likewise I gave
your friendly messages to our comrades, who all wanted to know where you
wrote from.... I replied that your letter came from Mantua. Whereupon
ensued various conversations, both private and general, anent your
specially favoured position, especially since a like favour has been
refused to Gruyère, who also applied for leave to travel, and declares
he brought very good reasons to support his request. I did not choose to
talk too much about you, for fear of heating opinions which were already
unfriendly, but I did reply at once to a remark made by a person who
shall be nameless, to the effect that it was neither very delicate nor
very straightforward on your part, last year, to go to Florence in the
first instance, when you had been granted permission, by special favour,
to go to Naples.

I combatted that idea with all my might, at the same time refusing to be
drawn into a discussion which might have degenerated into a dispute. And
then, dear Hector, if you only knew how some people's tempers have
altered since you went away! If it goes on, I really believe you will
find some individuals with their noses in the air, as people call it. I
am not the only person that strikes, and I think it can hardly escape
your notice too.

As to myself, in another ten days I shall start for Naples, and I expect
to spend six weeks or two months, not at Naples itself, but in the
kingdom and the islands. The month of September I shall probably spend
at Frascati, so as to get a good look, and a last one, at that splendid
Monte Cavi, of which I am very anxious to make some studies. If you
write to me, direct to the _Poste Restante_ at Naples. I will go and
fetch my letters when I am in town, and have them sent after me wherever
I may be. I have been making a tour, quite lately, in the mountains near
Subiaco, Civitella, Olevano, &c. I saw much that was beautiful, but what
interested me most was the Convent of San Benedetto at Subiaco. I saw
and felt things there that I shall never forget.

I have had news from home lately. They are all well, and send you
affectionate messages. They tell me Urbain had written you to Genoa, so
that you might find the letter there on the 15th. I don't know how he
makes out you will be at Genoa then, but, anyhow, I fancy his reckoning
is at fault. However, the letter had better be there before you than
after. You are sure to get it when you leave Milan, or you could, if you
liked, have it sent you by some friend. Then my mother says Blanchard
has been so excessively kind as to make a small drawing of your portrait
for Urbain, which has touched both mother and son immensely. Blanchard,
so my mother tells me, has had a bad attack of fever since he got back
to Paris, but he is much better now. He has dined with my people several
times since his return, and my mother says he is very pleasant, has very
nice ways, and she likes him because he strikes her as being very
good-natured.

You doubtless know, if you have come across any French newspaper, that
our friend, Jules Richomme, has not been admitted to compete for the
Grand Prix. I am very much distressed at the news, for his sake and that
of his family, who so greatly desired to see him win the Prize and come
to Rome. I am sure now to see him in Paris, for even if he won the Prize
next year, he would not start until after my return. And how goes your
work, my dear fellow? Your portfolios must be getting handsomely filled,
methinks! Write me all about it--how you are--what you are doing. Though
I'm not absolutely sharp in your line of occupation, I think my
eagerness to know about everything that interests and pleases you will
rub up my wits to a certain extent, at all events. Anyhow, I put myself
into your hands to tell me what you like. So long as it does not bore
you nor waste your time, tell on!

Farewell, dear Hector. Keep well, and keep me in your affection--that
last being a good work, which shall bring you manifold reward!

Mind you are as exact in giving me your successive addresses as I shall
be in sending you mine, during my journey and after it.

I salute you, with all filial fondness.

CH. GOUNOD.


II

MONSIEUR H. LEFUEL, _Architect, Académie de France, Villa Medicis,
Rome_.

NAPLES, _Tuesday, July 14, 1840_.

MY DEAR HECTOR,--I wish I could have written these few lines which I now
send you by Murat[5] sooner. But the fact is that up to the present I
have barely had time to write a tolerable scrawl to my brother; and here
in Naples, where I made some acquaintances three months ago, my first
duty has been to go round and pay calls. However, I hope to have more
time to spare in future. I have written to Desgoffe also, and would
gladly have done as much by our good Hébert; please make all sorts of
excuses to him for me. He will certainly hear from me direct one of
these days, almost at once indeed, for I am thinking, though not quite
decidedly as yet, of starting on Wednesday or Thursday in next week to
see Ischia and Capri, returning to Naples by Pæstum, Salerno, Amalfi,
Sorrento, and Pompeii. A twelve days' trip or thereabouts.

I hope, my dear fellow, your health has been good since I
left,--Desgoffe's as well. I beg he'll see you do not work too hard! It
must be very hot now where you are. Here in Naples it is sometimes very
close; to-day, for instance, it is overwhelmingly thundery and
oppressive, but the sea-breeze is not unpleasant, and as we live almost
on the sea-shore, we get the benefit of it, and make the most of its
freshness.

Naples (I mean the town, of course) bores me more than ever. I am very
curious to see Capri and Ischia, and also Pæstum. Yesterday at long last
I went up to the Camaldoli; the view is wonderful, especially over the
wide expanse of sea. You know how I love the sea. The longer one looks
at it, the better one understands that simple horizontal line beyond
which one can fancy infinite space stretching away for ever. To-morrow
afternoon at four, if the weather keeps fine, we mean to go up Vesuvius
and watch the sunset; we shall spend the night there, to see the
moonlight on the bay, and the sunrise next morning. You see our
expedition promises to be delightful.

The day before yesterday I had a letter from my mother, forwarded from
Rome. If it was you who sent it on, dear Hector, accept my best thanks.
My mother and my good brother Urbain send you many friendly messages.

What do you think of Monsieur Ingres's picture? Write and tell me, or
else slip a line into Desgoffe's letter, when he answers mine. Address
your letters to "La Ville de Rome, Quai Santa Lucia, Naples." If I am
not there when they arrive, I shall find them when I get back.

Please tell Hébert that I should much like to have his opinion of
Monsieur Ingres's picture as well as yours; although I can hardly expect
to hear from him until I write myself.

Give my love to my little brother Vauthier, who will not forget me, I
hope. Tell Fleury[6] how sorry I was not to say good-bye to him before
starting, and finally, give all my comrades, individually and
collectively, my best wishes, in our time-honoured fashion.

Farewell, dear Hector. I send you my best love, with all my heart too,
for indeed I feel our common exile with threefold bitterness out
here.--Your very affectionate

CHARLES GOUNOD.

       *       *       *       *       *

Guénepin[7] will write to you in a day or two. He sends you many
friendly greetings. He is a very good fellow, and we have had a pleasant
journey, although we have never had more than three or four hours in
bed. But that's a trifle. When you write, pray let me know if Desgoffe
has sent again to fetch my score of "Der Freischütz" from Prince
Soutzo's.


III

MONSIEUR HECTOR LEFUEL, _Poste Restante, Venice_.

ROME, _April 4, 1841_.

BELOVED AND REVERED PARENT,[8]--Your afflicted child has been racking
his poor brain to know where he should write to you, and was beginning
in fact to have serious doubts of the reality of the affection his
ancient relative professes for him. However, he now rejoices to have
learnt through Monsieur Schnetz that the undaunted centenarian has
removed himself from Florence to Bologna, on his way to Venice as fast
as he can get there.

To Venice, therefore, does his son, greatly comforted by the joyful
news, indite the following epistle to inform him, firstly, that he
himself is in rude health, and secondly, that his musical Mass has had a
great success, not only among his fellow-students here, but also among
the uninitiated vulgar. The thought of his venerable friend's delight at
once occurred to the composer, and was indeed a potent factor in his
legitimate joy in his success. He begs to add that he unceasingly
deplores the absence of his aged kinsman, the person he naturally clung
to most while he was here, and of whom Fate has so cruelly and
inopportunely bereft him.

I too have news from Paris, my dear good Hector. My letters are full of
friendly messages for you. My mother, why, I know not, was under the
impression I should see you again within a month or two; I have
undeceived her on that head, and I am very sure she regrets it much. And
then you will not have heard the news I have about Urbain, news that
gave me a great thrill of joy at first, which changed to deepest
disappointment when the end of the paragraph appeared. It was neither
more nor less than the idea of his coming out to Sicily and Rome, but it
is all off now, and this is why.

The Marquis de Crillon, who has always taken a great interest in my
family, being himself about to travel in Sicily, desired to find a
talented and educated artist; a really earnest man, in fact, to keep him
company. He thought of Urbain, so calling at our house one day, he laid
his plan before my mother. She thanked him for his goodness, told him
how deeply she appreciated his kind thought, and seized the earliest
opportunity of speaking to my brother. He, after short though serious
reflection, made up his mind to accept Monsieur de Crillon's offer. When
it came to taking leave of his clients, he saw such long faces
everywhere, and the regret at his departure was so general--everybody
vowed it would be so impossible to find such delicacy, such integrity,
and the other good and estimable qualities you know him to possess, in
any other man--that getting away began to look far from easy. But there
is more besides. Here is what really put the spoke in his wheel. All his
future interests were suddenly threatened with compromise for lack of
ten or twelve thousand francs. You will easily imagine that under such
circumstances he was forced to stay in Paris. I am very uneasy about
this somewhat critical state of things, and wait impatiently for news of
what has happened next. I will let you know in my next letter. Poor
Urbain, so good a fellow, who has worked so hard! Luckily he has plenty
of pluck, and will bear the most unpleasant ordeal bravely, but all the
same it is very hard on him.

I had heard, dear Hector, you had written to Gruyère. I was beginning to
grow jealous, when Hébert said to me, "Cheer up, it's only about
something he wants him to do for him!" So I took comfort in the hope
that I should shortly hear from you myself. I must tell you that the
proofs of friendly interest shown me by many of my comrades here, and
notably our good little painter Hébert, have made me very happy. I have
the keenest sense of gratitude for the care and attention with which I
saw him listen to the rehearsal of my Mass. No indifferent person would
have bestowed them, and it is always a pleasure to be able to mention a
case of sympathetic interest. Knowing your affection for Hébert, I
rejoice to tell you this, for I feel sure your regard for him will not
be lessened on account of that he bears me. His health is as rude as
mine, and, like all the rest of our comrades here, he bids me send you
many greetings. I am going to see if he is at home, and try to get him
to add a line or two at the end of this letter.

Bazin has not yet arrived. I haven't an idea what has become of him. I
am rather afraid that, in the enthusiasm aroused by his passage through
his native place, his fellow-townsmen may have laid violent hands upon
his person, and nailed him on a pedestal, as a statue dedicated to his
own glory! They are a hot-headed set at Marseilles, and quite capable of
anything of the sort! He might send himself in as the result of his
Academy work!

Good-bye, my dear Hector. You know how fond I am of you, so, as the
saying is, I salute you on both cheeks and on your left eye likewise. If
Courtépée[9] is still with you, tell him I grasp his hand with special
fervour. I hope you are full of health and spirits, both of you, and I
think if you are having the same weather as we are, you must be doing
wonderful good work. Good-bye again, dear friend,--Yours always,

CHARLES GOUNOD.

       *       *       *       *       *

MY DEAR ARCHITECT,--I seize the opportunity our good musician's letter
gives me, to let you know I am alive. Our great sculptor Gruyère has
informed me you are struggling with an accumulation of head colds. I
trust the sun that shines o'er noble and voluptuous Venice will thaw the
ice winter has piled within your brain!

You had a great success at the Exhibition. Everybody was much struck by
your drawings, the Ambassador and his wife most of all. I do not mention
my own performances; they are neither important nor well executed enough
to be worth writing about. Our celebrated composer's Mass has had a
great success, both amongst ourselves and with the general public. It
was well performed, thanks to the activity he displayed in shaking up
all the old sleepy-heads! If you see Loubens,[10] pray give him my best
regards. What have you done with Courtépée? Can you get him up in the
mornings when you get up yourself, you early bird?

Farewell! If I can make myself either useful or agreeable to you,
command me.--E. HÉBERT.

       *       *       *       *       *

Murat absolutely refuses to write even two lines. He says he will write
later on.

CHARLES GOUNOD.

       *       *       *       *       *

That is a lie!--MURAT.




III

_GERMANY_


My natural road from Rome to Germany lay by Florence into Northern
Italy, and so eastwards _viâ_ Ferrara, Padua, Venice, and Trieste.

Although I did make a halt in Florence, I cannot undertake to give a
full description of that city. Like Rome, it possesses an inexhaustible
store of art treasures. The Uffizi Gallery with its wonderful Tribune (a
very shrine of exquisite relics), the Palazzo Pitti, the Academy,
Churches and Convents, all teem with masterpieces. But even here, in
lovely Florence, Michael Angelo reigns supreme, from the proud eminence
of that wonderful and overwhelmingly impressive Medici Chapel, on which,
as on the Vatican at Rome, his genius has stamped its mark--unique,
incomparable, overshadowing every other.

Wherever Michael Angelo's hand has been, devoutest attention is
instinctively aroused; when the master speaks, all others hold their
peace. Nowhere perhaps is the mysterious power of supreme silence more
effectually shown than in the awe-inspiring crypt of the Medici Chapel.
How tremendous is that figure of the "Pensieroso" standing there
motionless like a silent sentinel over death, awaiting the blast of the
last trump! What repose and grace, too, in the figure of Night, or
rather of Sleep, "that knits up the ravelled sleave of Care," beside the
robust form of Day lying bound and fettered as it were, till the last
dawn shall come. It is the deep meaning hidden in all Michael Angelo's
work, as well as the combination of nature and fancy in the attitudes of
his statues, which gives them that intensity of expression so specially
characteristic of his mighty genius. The huge proportions of his figures
are but a type of the deep bed worn by the torrent of his mighty
thoughts, and thus it is that any imitation of a form of art which
nothing but his genius had power to fill and quicken is foredoomed to
seem both pompous and bombastic. But time and lack of funds forbade my
tarrying on my road to Germany, so I can do no more than mention
Florence, and the pleasant recollections I took away with me. I passed
through the deserted city of Ferrara, and spent a couple of days in
Padua to see the beautiful frescoes of Giotto and Mantegna.

During my stay in Italy I had made acquaintance with the three great
cities which are the art centres of that favoured land--Rome, Florence,
and Naples. Rome, the City of the soul; Florence, the City of the mind;
Naples, the home of brilliant sunlight, of wild and dazzling gaiety.

I was about to make the acquaintance of a fourth, which, like the
others, holds a great and glorious place in the history of art. For the
geographical position of the city has given Venice and Venetian art a
distinct and unique character of their own.

Cheerful or sad, sunlit or gloomy, rose-red or deadly pale, smiling or
darkly forbidding, each and all by turns, Venice is one perpetual
kaleidoscope, a weird mixture of the most contradictory impressions, a
pearl, I might almost say, cast into a dark and noisome place. Venice!
she charms like any sorceress! She is the native haunt of the most
radiant form of art. She has cast a flood of sunshine on the painter's
canvas!

Unlike Rome, which waits your pleasure, draws you slowly onwards step by
step, until you fall into an utter and never-ending thraldom of
admiration, Venice takes swift hold upon your senses, and fascinates you
at one fell swoop. Rome is serene and soothing, Venice heady and
exciting. The intoxication of her charms is tinged (it was at least in
my case) with a sort of nameless melancholy, like a captive's sense of
loneliness. Is it the shadow cast by the dark deeds of former days, to
which the city seems predestined by its very situation? It may be. But
whether it be so or not, I cannot fancy any one staying long in this
semi-amphibious City of the Dead without growing to feel half choked and
plunged into deep depression. With its sleeping waters lapping in dismal
silence round the walls of its old palaces, and its gloomy shadows
whence the groan of some murdered noble seems to float, Venice is a city
of terror; disaster hangs around her even now!

But yet, in the full sunlight, what can be more fairylike than the Grand
Canal, or those glittering lagoons whose waves seem made of liquid
light! What vivid power clings to those relics of departed splendour,
which seem to call aloud to the blue sky, beseeching it to save them
from the abyss that slowly but surely sucks them down, and will end some
day by engulphing them for ever!

Rome stands for meditation, Venice for intoxication. Rome is the great
Latin ancestress whose conquests are destined to give the world one
catholic and universal language--a prelude and a means to another
Catholicism, deeper and vaster yet. Venice is a true Oriental--Byzantine,
not Greek; she makes one think much more of Satraps than of Pontiffs,
of Eastern luxury rather than of Athenian or Roman dignity.

Even San Marco, with all its wonders, is more of a mosque than a
basilica or a cathedral; it appeals far more to the imagination than to
the deepest feelings of the soul. The splendour of the mosaics and
gilding, pouring a stream of dark rich tints from the roof of the dome
to its very base, is utterly unique. I know nothing like it either in
strength of colouring or powerfulness of effect.

Venice breathes passion, as distinct from love. I was bewitched the
moment I arrived, but I left it without the pang I felt on quitting
Rome--a sure sign and measure of the impression each city had produced
on me.

Naples is like a smile from Greece; the horizon glowing with purple and
azure, the blue sky reflected by the sapphire sea, even the ancient
name, Parthenope, carry us back to that brilliant civilisation on which
nature had bestowed such an exquisite setting. But Venice smiles on the
traveller in quite a different way. She is coaxing and she is false,
like a feast laid out on the trap-door of a dungeon. This doubtless is
why involuntarily I felt more relief than regret when I departed, in
spite of the masterpieces of art and the mysterious and magic charm I
left behind me.

A steamer bore me to Trieste, where I at once took the stage-coach for
Gratz. I halted on my way to visit the curious and wonderful stalactite
caverns of Adelsberg; they are like underground cathedrals. Crossing the
Carinthian mountains (whose ragged outline I consigned to my
sketch-book), I reached Gratz, and then Olmutz. Thence I went on by
railway to Vienna, my first stopping place on this German tour which it
was my one object to get through as quickly as possible, so as to
shorten my exile from my mother's roof.

Vienna is a very cheerful city. The inhabitants struck me as being much
more like Frenchmen than Germans. They are full of vivacity, high
spirits, good-humour, and gaiety.

I had brought no letters of introduction with me, and I did not know a
single soul. I took up my quarters in an hotel until I should be able to
find quieter and less expensive rooms. It was absolutely necessary, as I
was to make a stay of some months' duration, to cut my coat according to
my cloth. A travelling acquaintance had strongly advised me to board and
lodge in a private family, if possible; and I soon found an opportunity
of putting his advice to a practical test.

Nothing in the world would have induced me to let my mother stint
herself to swell my modest purse; even had I felt the least inclined to
unnecessary expenditure, the thought of her life of toil would have
overcome any such temptation. Board, lodging, and theatre expenses
(which last were a necessary item in my musical education) made up the
whole of my necessary outlay, and with due care and economy the amount
of my scholarship was quite sufficient to cover that.

The first thing I saw advertised on the Viennese Opera posters was
Mozart's "Flauto Magico." I rushed forthwith and took the cheapest
ticket I could get, for the very top of the house. Modest as it was, I
would not have bartered it for an empire!

It was the first chance I had had of hearing that exquisite score, and I
was perfectly enchanted. It was thoroughly well rendered. Otto Nicolaï
conducted the orchestra. The Queen of Night was very well played by a
singer of remarkable talent, Madame Hasselt Barth; the High Priest
Sarastro by a celebrated artist with a splendid voice, a first-class
method, and a magnificent style--Staudigl himself. The other _rôles_,
too, were very carefully performed, and I still remember the sweet
voices of the boys who appeared as the three Genii.

I sent in my name (as an Academy student) to the Conductor, and asked if
I could see him. He sent for me, and I was conducted to his presence on
the stage itself, where he introduced me to the various artists, with
whom I kept up pretty close relations from that night out. As I could
not speak a single word of German, and as most of them knew little more
French, it was not easy to get on at first. While I was standing on the
stage, I was lucky enough to make acquaintance, also through Nicolaï,
with a member of the orchestra, who spoke French. His name was Lévy,
and he was the leading cornet-player. His son, Richard Lévy, then
fourteen years old, held the same appointment at the Viennese Opera in
later years as his father had before him. He received me in the kindest
way, and asked me to call upon him. In a very short time we were firm
friends. He had three other children. The eldest, Carl Lévy, was a
talented pianist and a skilful composer; the second, Gustave, is now a
musical publisher at Vienna; and the daughter, Melanie, a charming
creature, married the harpist Parish Alwars.

Through his kind offices, after a few weeks' residence in Vienna, I made
the acquaintance of Count Stockhammer, one of the most useful friends I
found there. He was President of the Philharmonic Society; and Lévy, to
whom I had shown the Mass I wrote in Rome, took me to see him, and spoke
of the work in very favourable terms. The Count, with kindly
promptitude, offered to have it performed in the Church of St. Charles,
by the soloists, choruses, and orchestra of the Society.[11] The day
fixed was the 14th of September.

My work seemed to give general satisfaction, a fact of which Count
Stockhammer at once gave me the most substantial proof by asking me to
write a Requiem Mass--solos, choruses, and orchestral accompaniments--to
be performed in the same church on All Souls' Day, November 2nd.

I had a bare six weeks before me. The only chance of getting the work
done in time was to toil at it night and day, without rest or
intermission. I joyfully agreed to do it, and did not lose a moment in
beginning. The Requiem was ready by the appointed date. Thanks to that
universal diffusion of musical knowledge which is such a delightful and
peculiar feature in Germany, a single rehearsal sufficed to make it all
run smoothly. I was particularly struck by the facility with which mere
schoolboys read music at sight--as easily as if it were their mother
tongue. The choruses, too, were rendered to perfection. Among the
soloists was a man of the name of Draxler, still quite young, with a
magnificent bass voice. He and Staudigl were the leading basses at the
Opera. I heard some years later that Staudigl had gone mad, and died;
and Draxler, who took his place, still held it when I went back to
Vienna in 1868, twenty-five years after, to produce my opera "Romeo and
Juliet."

Some time before the performance of my Requiem, Nicolaï had made me
acquainted with an eminent composer named Becker, who devoted himself
entirely to chamber music. A quartette party met at his house every
week, and Holz, the first violin, had known Beethoven very intimately; a
fact which, putting his own talent aside, made him very interesting
company. Becker was also considered the most capable musical critic in
all Germany at that time. He came to hear my Requiem, and published a
_critique_ couched in terms of such high compliment as to be an immense
encouragement to so young a man as I then was. My score, he said,
"though evidently from the hand of a novice whose style is still
unformed, and who has scarcely realised whither his powers may lead him,
displays a grandeur of conception which is exceedingly rare now-a-days."

This heavy piece of work, undertaken and carried through within such a
short space of time, knocked me up so completely that I fell ill with a
violent attack of sore throat, complicated with abscesses. Not wishing
to frighten my mother, I confided the true state of my health to nobody
except my dear friends the Desgoffes, who were then in Paris. The moment
Desgoffe knew I was lying ill in Vienna he left wife, daughter, and the
pictures he was painting for the Salon, without a moment's hesitation,
and started off to watch by my bedside and nurse me.

The journey from Paris to Vienna took five or six days at that time. It
was now mid-winter, December in fact, and what would have been bad
enough in any case at that season, was made far worse by the serious
illness my poor friend contracted on the way. When he arrived at Vienna
he stood sorely in need of care himself. Yet he spent no fewer than
twenty-two days at my bedside, snatching a few moments' sleep on a
mattress on the floor, and watching over my every movement with the most
motherly care. He only left me and returned to Paris when the doctor had
satisfied him that I was completely convalescent.

Such friendship is not often met with; but, indeed, Providence has been
more than good to me in that respect.

The success of my Requiem had made me alter my plans as to my stay in
Germany, and I determined to prolong my sojourn in Vienna. Count
Stockhammer gave me a fresh commission on behalf of the Philharmonic
Society. This time it was a vocal Mass without accompaniment, to be sung
in Lent in the same church, dedicated to St. Charles, my patron saint. I
was glad to take this fresh opportunity, not only of gaining practice in
my art, but also of getting my work performed--a rare and precious
privilege at the opening of any man's career. This was the second
considerable piece of work I did at Vienna, and my last. I left that
city immediately after the performance for Berlin, _viâ_ Prague and
Dresden, in neither of which towns did I stay long. But I felt I must
not leave Dresden without visiting that admirable museum which, among
other treasures, contains the famous Madonna by Holbein, and that other
wonderful Madonna known as the "San Sisto," painted by Raphael's
master-hand.

As soon as I reached Berlin I went, according to her request, to call on
Madame Henzel. But within three weeks I was seriously ill again, this
time with internal inflammation, and that just when I had written my
mother that I was about to start homewards, and that we should soon be
reunited after our weary separation of over three and a half years.

Madame Henzel at once sent her own doctor to me, and to him I presented
the following ultimatum--

"Sir, I have a mother waiting for me in Paris, counting the hours till I
get back; if she were to hear I am prevented from getting home by
illness, she would probably start off to join me, and she might quite
possibly lose her reason on the road. She is getting old. I must make up
some explanation of my delay, but it can only be a very short one. I can
only give you a fortnight, either to bury me or set me on my legs
again."

"Very good," quoth the doctor; "if you will make up your mind to obey my
orders, you may travel in a fortnight."

He kept his word; on the fourteenth day I was out of the wood, and eight
and forty hours after I had started for Leipzig, where Mendelssohn was
living, with a letter of introduction to him from his sister, Madame
Henzel.

Mendelssohn received me wonderfully--I use the expression advisedly, to
describe the condescension extended by such an illustrious man to a
youth who could not in his eyes have been more than a novice. I can
truly say that for the four days I spent at Leipzig he devoted himself
to me. He questioned me about my studies and my works with the keenest
and sincerest interest. He made me play some of my later efforts to him,
and gave me precious words of approbation and encouragement. One
sentence only will I quote; I am too proud of it ever to have forgotten
it. I had just played him the "Dies Iræ" from my Vienna Requiem. He laid
his finger on a passage written for five voices without accompaniment,
and said--

"My boy, that might have been written by Cherubini!"

Such words from such a master are better than any decoration--more
precious to their recipient than all the ribbons and stars in Europe.

Mendelssohn was Director of the "Gewandhaus" Philharmonic Society. As
the concert season was over, there were no meetings of the society going
on, but he showed me the delicate kindness of calling its members
together for my benefit. Thus I heard his beautiful work known as the
"Scotch Symphony" in A Minor, and he afterwards gave me the full score
endorsed with a few kind words in his own handwriting.

Too soon, alas! the early death of that splendid genius, in the heyday
of his beauty and his charm, was to transform this friendly memento into
a treasured and precious relic. He died only six months after the
charming woman to whom I owed my acquaintance with her gifted brother.

Mendelssohn did not confine himself to calling the Philharmonic Society
together for my benefit. An admirable organist himself, he was anxious I
should make acquaintance with some of the numerous and admirable works
composed by the mighty Sebastian Bach for the instrument over which he
reigned supreme. With this object, he had the old organ at St.
Thomas's--the very instrument Bach himself used--examined and repaired,
and there for two long hours and more he revealed an unknown world of
beauty to my wondering ears.

Finally, to crown it all, he presented me with a collection of motets by
this same Bach, who was a sort of god to him, in whose school he had
been formed from infancy, and whose Passion music, "according to St.
Matthew," he had conducted and accompanied by heart before he was
fifteen.

Such was the kind treatment I received at the hands of that most lovable
of men, that splendid artist, that magnificent musician, cut off, alas!
in the flower of his age (just eight-and-thirty), snatched from the
plaudits he had earned so well, and from the yet more glorious results
the later efforts of his talent might have yielded. Strange is the fate
of genius, even when endued with the charm possessed by his! It was not
till Mendelssohn himself was dead that the ears which would not hearken
in his lifetime learnt to appreciate the exquisite works which are now
the joy and delight of every subscriber to the Conservatoire concerts.

Once I had seen Mendelssohn I could think of nothing except of getting
back as fast as possible to Paris and to my beloved mother. I left
Leipzig on May 18, 1843. I changed carriages seventeen times on the
road, and travelled four nights out of six. At length, on May 25, I
reached Paris, where my life was to enter on a new and different phase.
I found my brother waiting for me when the mail-coach arrived, and
together we hurried to that beloved home into which I was about to carry
so much new happiness, and return to so much that I had left behind.




IV

_HOME AGAIN_


Whether my three and a half years of absence had wrought a mighty change
in my appearance, or my last illness (still very recent) and the stains
of travel had played havoc with my looks, I know not, but anyhow my
mother did not recognise me when I arrived. True, I had a budding beard,
but such a slight one, that any one might have counted every hair.

During my absence my mother had left the Rue de l'Éperon, and settled
down in the Rue Vaneau, in the parish known as "Les Missions
Etrangères," the church of which stands at the corner of the Rue du Bac
and the Rue de Babylone. There a post awaited me which was to fill up my
time for several years to come. The priest of this parish, the Abbé
Dumarsais, had formerly been chaplain at the Lycée St. Louis. His
predecessor at the Missions Etrangères was the Abbé Lecourtier.

While I was in Rome at the Académie de France, the Abbé Dumarsais had
written to offer me, on my return, the appointment of organist and
chapel-master to his parish. This I had accepted, but under certain
conditions. I had no notion of taking any advice, and still less any
orders, on musical matters, from priest or parish authorities, or
anybody else. I had my own ideas, my own opinions, my own convictions.
In short, I meant either to have my own way about the music, or not have
anything to do with it. That was flat. However, my conditions were
accepted, and all should have gone smoothly.

But old habit is hard to break. My predecessor had accustomed the worthy
parishioners to a style of music quite different from that which I had
brought back with me from Rome and Germany. Palestrina and Bach were
deities in _my_ eyes, and I was casting down the idols _they_ were
accustomed to worship.

The means at my disposal were almost _nil_. Besides the organ--a small
and very inferior instrument--I had two basses, a tenor, and one
choir-boy, without reckoning myself, who was chapel-master, organist,
singer, and composer all in one. I had to do my best with what I found
to my hand, and the necessity which forced me to use these very modest
resources to the best possible advantage was of real benefit to me in
the long run. Things went on well enough at first, but I guessed, from a
sort of coldness and reserve I noticed, that I was not altogether in the
good books of the congregation. I was not mistaken. About the end of my
first year of office, the priest sent for me, and confided to me that he
had to endure many complaints and reproaches from his flock. Monsieur or
Madame So-and-so did not consider the musical part of the service the
least bit cheerful or entertaining. He therefore suggested to me to
"change my style," and to "give in to them a little."

"My dear Abbé," I said, "you know our bargain. I didn't come here to
consult the taste of your parishioners, but to improve it. If they don't
like my 'style,' as you call it, there is a simple way out of the
difficulty. I will resign, you can reappoint my predecessor, and
everybody will be satisfied. The matter is entirely in your own hands."

"Very well," said the Abbé; "all right. I accept your resignation."

Thereupon we parted the best of friends. I had not been home for more
than half an hour when the Abbé's servant knocked at my door.

"Well, Jean, what is it?"

"Sir, Monsieur Abbé would like to see you."

"Oh, really! All right, Jean; say I will come in a moment."

When I met the Abbé he began again on the same subject.

"Come, come, my dear boy, it is a word and a blow with you really and
truly! Is there no middle course? Do let us consider the matter calmly.
You went off like a sky-rocket this morning!"

"My dear Abbé, there is not the slightest use in beginning it all over
again. I stick to everything I have said. If I am to notice the
objections of this person or that, I may just as well give up trying to
do anything at all. Either I stay with a perfectly free hand, or else I
go. Those are my conditions, as you know, and I will not alter them one
jot."

"Oh dear! oh dear!" he said, "what a terrible fellow you are!" And then
after a pause, "Well then, you had better stop!"

From that day forth he never mentioned the subject again, and left me
absolute liberty of action. Little by little, my bitterest opponents
became my warmest supporters, and the increasing sympathy of my hearers
soon caused my modest salary to swell. I had begun with 1200 francs a
year, which was not a large sum. The second year my pay was increased by
300 francs; the third I had 1800, and the fourth 2100 francs. But I must
not anticipate.

We lived, my mother and I, in the same house as the Abbé. Another
priest, three years older than myself, who had been a schoolfellow of
mine at the Lycée St. Louis, resided under the same roof--the Abbé
Charles Gay. In the ordinary course of events, the disparity of our ages
and his seniority in the school would have prevented any intimacy
between us, even if we had happened to be acquainted with each other.
However, our common taste for music had brought us together at the
Lycée. Charles Gay, who was then about fourteen, had very remarkable
musical aptitude, and used to take the second soprano parts in the
choruses; he was also one of the most brilliant scholars at the college.
He concluded his studies, and I lost sight of him for three years. I met
him again in the Foyer at the Opera one night, when "La Juive" was
being played. I knew him at once, and accosted him.

"Hallo!" he said, "is that you? And what are you doing with yourself?"

"I have gone in for composing."

"Really!" he said. "So have I. Who are you working with?"

"With Reicha."

"Why, so am I. This is delightful; we must see a lot of each other!"

Thus it was that our schoolboy friendship was renewed, and still remains
one of the strongest of my life.

I had the greatest admiration for my friend, who possessed musical
powers of the very highest order, and whose talent, as I freely
recognised, far surpassed my own. His compositions struck me as being
full of genius, and I envied him the career I felt sure the future had
in store for him. I often spent my evenings in his rooms, where there
was always plenty of music going on. His sister was an excellent
pianiste, and besides his own compositions (which we often used to try
over, among his intimate friends), trios by Mozart and Beethoven were
frequently given.

One day I received a note from my friend (who was out of town) asking
me to come and see him, as he had something interesting to tell me. My
first thought was that he was going to be married; but when I reached
his house, he told me he was anxious to enter the Church. This explained
all the folios and other big books I had for some time remarked lying
about on his table. I was too young then to grasp the meaning of so
sudden a change, and I regretted his decision to sacrifice such a
smiling future to a life which seemed to me devoid of charm.

Meanwhile he made up his mind to pay a visit to Rome, and there begin
his theological studies. I myself had just won the Grand Prix, which
necessitated my going to Rome for two years. So it fell out that I met
my friend again, he having arrived some three months before myself. When
I came back from Germany, luck brought us together again by settling us
under the same roof.

The Abbé Gay has now been a priest for more than thirty years, and is
the Vicar-General of his intimate friend the Bishop of Poitiers.[12] Not
his virtues only, but his talents as a speaker and a writer too, have
brought him the reputation of being one of the most eminent ornaments
the French clergy boasts.

Towards the third year of my duties as chapel-master, I myself felt a
certain leaning towards an ecclesiastical career. Besides my musical
studies, I had dabbled somewhat in philosophy and theology, and had even
attended the theological lectures at the seminary at St. Sulpice all
through one winter, wearing the dress of an ecclesiastical student.

But I had utterly mistaken my own nature and my proper vocation. I felt,
after a time, that existence without my art was quite impossible for me,
so, casting off the garb which suited me so ill, I went back into the
world again. To this youthful phase of mine, however, I owe a friendship
which I make it a point of honour to record in this chronicle of my life
history.

During the summer of 1846 I was ordered, with the Abbés Dumarsais and
Gay, to take sea baths at Trouville. One day I had a narrow escape from
drowning, and so quickly did the press get hold of the fact, that the
news was published next morning even in the Paris papers. Luckily I had
lost no time in writing to tell my brother I was safe, so he was able
to calm my mother's fears by showing her my letter. The papers had
calmly announced that "I had been brought home dead on a shutter!" Truly
the flimsiest truth travels slower than the weightiest lie! We chanced
during this sea-bathing trip to come across a worthy Abbé walking on the
beach with a boy, who was his pupil. This boy, some twelve or thirteen
years of age, was named Gaston de Beaucourt. His mother, the Comtesse de
Beaucourt, owned a fine property some leagues from Trouville, between
Pont l'Evêque and Lisieux. She invited us, in the most courteous and
kindly way, to go and stay there before returning to Paris.

That charming and lovable boy, now a man of three-and-forty, and one of
the best that ever lived, became my lifelong friend, to whose affection,
sure and strong and tender, I owe not only the happiness our perfect
mutual comprehension brings, but many a precious proof of the deepest
and most unselfish devotion.

The Revolution of 1848 had just broken out when I resigned my post as
chapel-master of the Missions Etrangères. My duties during the four and
a half years I held it had served me admirably in the development and
improvement of my musical education; but they were not calculated to
advance my career to any practical extent, for they kept me vegetating
in a corner, as it were. There is only one road for a composer who
desires to make a real name--the operatic stage. The stage is the one
place where a musician can find constant opportunity and means of
communicating with the public. It is a sort of daily and permanent
exhibition where his works can be perpetually on view.

Religious and symphonic music no doubt rank higher, in the strictest
sense, than dramatic composition; but opportunities for distinction in
that highest sphere are very rare, and can only affect an occasional
audience, not a regular and systematic one like the opera-going public.
Then, again, look at the huge variety of subject which lies before the
dramatic author! What scope for fancy, for invention! what endless
plots!

The stage tempted me irresistibly. I was nearly thirty, and eager to try
my fortune on the fresh field I dreamt of. But I had no libretto, and I
knew nobody whom I could ask to write me one. Then I had to find an
impresario willing to employ me and trust me with a commission; and who
was likely to do that, in face of the undoubted fact that my previous
training had been mostly confined to sacred music, and that I knew
nothing about the stage? Altogether I was in a fix.

But fortune led me to a man who soon shed light upon my path. This was
the violinist Seghers, who then managed the concerts of the Société Ste.
Cecile, in the Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin. Some compositions of mine had
been performed at these concerts, and very favourably received. Seghers
was a friend of the Viardots. Madame Viardot was then at the zenith of
her talent and reputation--this was in 1849, just when she had created
the _rôle_ of Fides in Meyerbeer's "Le Prophète" with such tremendous
success. Madame Viardot received me with the utmost kindness, and
suggested my letting her hear some of my work. I complied, of course,
with the greatest delight. We spent a long time at the piano, and after
listening to me with the kindest attention, she said--

"But, Monsieur Gounod, why do you not write an opera?"

"Indeed, Madame," I replied, "I would gladly do so, but I have no
libretto."

"But surely you know somebody who could write you one?"

"Oh yes, no doubt I do; but 'could' and 'would' are very different
words! I know, or rather when I was a child I _used_ to know, Emile
Augier; we trundled our hoops together in the Luxemburg. But since those
days Augier has grown famous, and I have remained in my native
obscurity. I hardly think my old playmate would care to join me in
anything more risky than a hoop race!"

"Very well," said Madame Viardot, "go and see Augier, and tell him that
if he will write the libretto I will sing the principal part in your
opera."

My readers may fancy I did not wait to be told that twice. I tore off to
Augier, who accepted my suggestion with enthusiastic delight.

"What! Madame Viardot!" he cried. "I should rather think so! I will set
to work at once!"

Nestor Roqueplan was then impresario at the Opera. He was quite willing,
on Madame Viardot's recommendation, to give up part of an evening's
performance to my work, but he could not, he said, spare more. So we had
to look for a subject which would combine three essential points--(1)
brevity, (2) interest, (3) a central female figure. We pitched on the
story of Sappho. The opera could not, in any case, be put into rehearsal
till the following year; besides, Augier had to finish a big work he was
then employed on. It was, I believe, his "Diane" for Mademoiselle
Rachel.

At all events I held a formal promise, and I awaited the event with
mingled impatience and calm. Just as I was about to set to work, a
crushing blow fell on me and mine. This was in April 1850. Augier had
just finished the poem of "Sappho." My brother was taken ill on the 2nd;
on the 3rd I signed my agreement with Roqueplan, whereby I undertook to
hand him over the score of "Sappho" by September 30 at latest. This
allowed me six months to compose and write a three-act opera, my maiden
dramatic effort. On the night of the 6th of April my brother breathed
his last. It was a fearful grief to my old mother and to all of us.

My brother left a widow, with a child of two years old, and the prospect
of another. It was born seven months later, opening its baby eyes on
this sad world on the very day when the Church joins us in mourning the
memory of our beloved dead.

These sad circumstances induced many difficulties and complications
which demanded close and immediate attention. The guardianship of the
children, the carrying on of my brother's business as an architect (for
his death left much work still unfinished), every possible consequence,
in fact, of such a sudden and unforeseen disaster, forced me to devote
my time for quite a month to safeguarding the interests and arranging
for the future of my unhappy sister-in-law, whose grief had quite
prostrated her, physically and mentally. Besides all this, my poor
mother nearly lost her reason under the stunning blow which had fallen
on her. Every circumstance, both personal and external, seemed combined
to unfit me utterly for an undertaking for which the time at my disposal
already seemed so insufficient.

Within about a month, however, I was able to think seriously of making
the beginning which was growing so urgently necessary. Madame Viardot,
who had been on tour in Germany, and whom I had informed of the sad
trouble we were in, wrote at once to urge me to take my mother with me
and settle down for a while at a country place of her own in the
neighbourhood of La Brie, where, she said, I should have the quiet and
calm I needed.

I took her advice, and my mother and I started for Madame Viardot's
house, where we found her mother (Madame Garcia, widow of the famous
singer), a sister of Monsieur Viardot's and a girl, his eldest child,
who is now Madame Heritte, and a composer of considerable note. There,
too, I met a most delightful man, Ivan Tourgueneff, the celebrated
Russian author, a close and intimate friend of the Viardot family.

I set to work at once. Though--strange fact!--the feelings which had
been so lately torn by painful emotion might naturally have been
expected to find their first expression in sorrow-laden and pathetic
strains, just the reverse took place. The first ideas that came to me
were full of gaiety and brightness, and they filled all my brain, as if
my inner nature, crushed down by grief and mourning, felt the need of
some reaction, and longed to draw a breath of happier life after my long
hours of anguish and days of tears and bitter mourning.

Thanks to the calmness of the atmosphere around me, my work progressed
much faster than I had dared to hope. After her German tour, Madame
Viardot's engagements took her to England, whence she returned in the
beginning of September, and found my labour nearly completed. I hastened
to play her my work, of which I anxiously desired her opinion. She was
quite satisfied with it, and in the course of a few days she knew the
score so well, that she was able to accompany the whole of it by heart.
This is about the most wonderful musical feat I ever witnessed, and
gives some idea of the extraordinary powers of that splendid musician.

"Sappho" was performed for the first time on April 16, 1851, just before
my thirty-second birthday. It was not a success, but, all the same, it
earned me a good position in the opinion of contemporary artists. It
does indeed betray a lack of theatrical instinct, a want of knowledge of
stage effect, and of the resources of an orchestra, and some ignorance
in handling it. But, on the other hand, the expression is true in
feeling, the appreciation of the subject, from the lyrical point of
view, is fairly exact, and the general style of treatment is distinctly
dignified in tendency. The finale of the first act produced an effect
which fairly astonished me. It was loudly and unanimously encored. I
could hardly believe my ears, though they were tingling with the
unaccustomed emotion, but the encore was repeated at every subsequent
performance.

The effect of the second act was not so good as that of the first, in
spite of the success of an air sung by Madame Viardot, and of the light
duet, "Va m'attendre, mon maître," sung by Brémond and Mdlle. Poinsot.
But the third act made a very good impression. The goatherd's song,
"Broutez le thym, broutez mes chèvres," was encored, and Sappho's final
stanza, "O ma lyre immortelle," were loudly applauded.

The cowherd's song gave the tenor Aymès his first opportunity of
appearing in public; he sang it beautifully, and thereby laid the
foundation of his reputation. Gueymard and Marié took the parts of Phaon
and Alcée.

My mother was present, of course, at the first performance of my opera.
As I passed along one of the corridors on the way from the stage to the
auditorium, where I was to meet her after the crowd had dispersed, I
came upon my friend Berlioz, his eyes still wet with tears. I threw my
arm round him, and said--

"Oh, dear Berlioz, come and show those wet eyes of yours to my mother.
No newspaper paragraph about my opera will make her half so proud."

He granted my request, and said to her--

"Madame, I do not think anything has touched me so much for the last
twenty years."

He afterwards published a notice of my opera, which I still regard as
one of the most flattering and precious I have ever had the delight and
honour of receiving.

"Sappho" was only acted six times. Madame Viardot's engagement was
almost over, and her place in the opera was taken by Mdlle. Masson, who
only sang the part three times.

I think it may safely be laid down as a general principle, that a
theatrical work always, or almost always, has the public reception it
really deserves. Theatrical success so inevitably depends on a variety
of small details, that the failure of any one--of the merest accessories
even--may (as has frequently happened) counterbalance, and perhaps
utterly compromise, the effect of the finest qualities of conception and
performance. Staging, ballet, scenery, dresses, book, fifty things go to
make or mar an opera. The public, if its interest is to be kept alive,
demands constant "variety." Many works of the very highest merit in some
respects, have failed, not in rousing the admiration of true artists,
but in winning popular favour, simply through their lack of this
"spice," so indispensable to that class of the public which is not
content with the simple charm of intellectual beauty.

I do not for a moment desire to claim the benefit of this excuse for my
"Sappho." The public's right of passing judgment on any work offered to
it is based on a prerogative peculiar to itself, and conferring special
competence. It would be unfair to ask or expect it to possess that
specific knowledge which would enable it to decide as to the technical
value of a work of art. But, on the other hand, the public has a
distinct right to expect and demand that a play or opera should satisfy
those particular instincts the satisfaction and gratification of which
it seeks within the playhouse walls. The success of a dramatic work then
does not depend solely on the quality of its form and style. Both are no
doubt essential--nay, indispensable--to save it from the rapid ravages
of Time, whose scythe spares naught that is not essentially true and
beautiful. But form and style are not its only, nor even, in a sense,
its strongest support. They may and do strengthen and solidify success;
they cannot make it.

The theatre-going public is a sort of dynamometer. It has nothing to do
with the question of whether the play is in good taste or not. Its sole
duty is to gauge what constitutes the true essence of every dramatic
work--the strength of passion and the degree of emotion it expresses;
its rendering, in fact, of the feelings which sway all human souls,
individually and collectively. The consequence is, that author and
audience become unconscious instruments in their mutual artistic
education. The public is the author's criterion and measure of truth;
the author serves his public as an exhibitor of the elements and
conditions of the beautiful. This explanation is the only one, to my
mind, which can account for the mysterious and incessant changes in
public taste. What was madly sought for yesterday is neglected to-day;
one evening will see men ready to tear to pieces the very thing the next
morning will see them worshipping on bended knees.

Though not exactly a success, "Sappho" brought me some solid advantage,
both present and future. On the very night of the first performance,
Ponsard asked me to undertake the choral music for "Ulysse," a tragedy
in five acts which he was just bringing out at the Théâtre Français. I
agreed at once, although I did not know the play. It was quite enough
for me to have the chance of collaborating with the author of "Lucrece,"
of "Charlotte Corday," and of "Agnès de Méranie." I felt quite safe.
Arsène Houssaye was then at the head of the Comédie Française. He was
obliged to add a chorus to the ordinary staff, and increase the
orchestra as well.[13]

"Ulysse" was played on June 18, 1852. I had been married a few days
previously to a daughter of Zimmerman,[14] the distinguished Professor
of the Piano at the Conservatoire. To his school we owe Prudent,
Marmontel, Goria, Lefebure-Wély, Ravina, Bizet, and many other fine
musicians. By this marriage I became brother-in-law to the young
painter, Edouard Dubufe, who was even then successfully following in his
father's footsteps. His son, Guillaume Dubufe, seems, at the time I
write, to be likely to maintain the reputation of his forefathers right
worthily.

The principal parts in "Ulysse" were filled by Mademoiselle Judith,
Messieurs Geffroy, Delaunay, and Maubant, Mademoiselle Nathalie, and
others. The musical portion of the performance consisted of no less than
fourteen choruses, one tenor solo, several melodramatic instrumental
passages, and an orchestral overture. There was a certain risk of
monotony in the general effect, as the composer was limited to orchestra
and chorus; but I was fortunate enough to avoid the difficulty fairly
well, and this second work of mine earned me fresh good-will in the
artistic world. No publisher had offered to publish the score of
"Sappho," but that of "Ulysse" was more favoured. Messieurs Escudier did
me the honour and the kindness of printing it free of charge.

"Ulysse" had a run of forty performances. It was the second ordeal, as
regards dramatic composition, through which my mother had watched me
pass. The choruses of "Ulysse," as far as I can judge them, are fairly
correct in character and expression, and are marked by a distinctly
personal style. The orchestral treatment still fails from lack of
experience, more than in actual colour, the general feeling for which
strikes me as being fairly good.

A few days after my marriage I was appointed Superintendent of
Instruction in Singing to the Communal Schools of the City of Paris, and
Director of the Choral Society connected with them, in the place of
Monsieur Hubert, himself the pupil and successor of Wilhem, the original
creator of the said society.

This post I held for eight years and a half, and its duties were of the
greatest service to me, musically speaking. They taught me to direct and
utilise large masses of vocal sound, so as to develop the maxim of
sonority under very simple methods of treatment.

My third musical venture on the stage was "La Nonne Sanglante," an opera
in five acts, by Scribe and Germain Delarigne. Nestor Roqueplan, who was
still Director of the Opera, had taken a fancy to "Sappho" and to me. I
was capable, so he declared, of doing great things, and at his wish I
wrote a five-act piece for the Opera. "La Nonne Sanglante" was written
in 1852-53, rehearsed for the first time on October 18, 1853, put aside
and rehearsed again several times over, and finally saw the footlights
on October, 18, 1854, just a year after the first rehearsal. It was only
acted eight times. Roqueplan was succeeded as Director of the Opera by
Monsieur Crosnier, and as the new chief declared he would not allow
"such stuff" to be acted, "La Nonne Sanglante" disappeared from the
bills, and has never shown her face again.

It was rather a grief to me. The very respectable figure reached by the
receipts certainly did not warrant such drastic and summary treatment.
But directorial decisions sometimes, so I have heard it whispered, have
hidden motives which it is vain to try and discover. In such cases the
real reason is concealed, and some other pretext put forward.

I cannot say whether "La Nonne Sanglante" would have had any permanent
success--I am inclined to think not. Not that the work was poor in
effects; there were some most striking situations. But the subject is
too uniformly gloomy. It had the drawback, too, of having a plot that
was more than fanciful or improbable; it was downright impossible, and
depended on a purely imaginary situation, utterly false, and therefore
devoid of dramatic interest, which cannot exist without truthfulness, or
at all events something approaching thereto.

I think, in the matter of orchestration, I made a forward stride in "La
Nonne Sanglante." Some parts show an increased knowledge of
instrumentation, and seem to bear the impress of a firmer hand. There is
good colour in many scenes--such, for instance, as the Crusaders' Hymn,
with Peter the Hermit and the chorus, in the first act; the symphonic
prelude in the ruins, and the Ghosts' March, in the second; the tenor
air and the duet with the Nun, in the third.

The principal parts were played by Mesdemoiselles Wertheimber and
Poinsot, and Messieurs Gueymard, Depassio, and Merly.

I solaced my disappointment by writing a symphony (No. 1 in D) for the
Société des Jeunes Artistes, which had just been started by Pasdeloup,
and which held its concerts in the Salle Herz, in the Rue de la
Victoire. This symphony was so well received that I wrote another (No. 2
in E flat) for the same society. It too achieved a certain success.

About the same time I composed a Solemn Mass for St. Cecilia's Day,
which was successfully performed for the first time on November 22,
1855, by the Association des Artistes Musiciens, in the Church of St.
Eustache, and has often been given since. I dedicated this Mass to the
memory of my father-in-law Zimmerman, whom we had lost on October 29,
1853.

Yet another misfortune overtook our family; on August 6, 1855, death
snatched away my wife's elder sister, Juliette Dubufe, wife of Edouard
Dubufe the painter, a rare and gifted creature, full of charming
qualities, and of exceptional talent as a sculptress and a pianiste.
"Goodness, wit, talent"--these are the words inscribed upon her tomb; a
simple epitaph, but eloquent in its simplicity and well deserved, fitly
expressing as it does the honour and regret showered on the memory of an
exquisite nature, the charm of which fell irresistibly on all who
approached her.

Nearly all my time was taken up with the management of the Choral
Society. I wrote a number of things for the big concerts of this
institution. Some were very well received; among others two Masses, one
of which had been performed under my direction on June 12, 1853, at the
Church of St Germain l'Auxerrois in Paris. During one of these great
annual meetings of the Choral Society, on Sunday, June 8, 1856, my wife
presented me with a son. (Three years before, on the 13th of the same
month, we had mourned the loss of our eldest child, a girl, who was born
dead). On the morning of the day when my boy was born, my brave wife
contrived to hide her sufferings from me until I left home for the
concert; and on my return in the afternoon, I found my son had opened
his eyes upon the world.

The birth of this child, which I had deeply longed for, was a joy and a
blessing to us both. He has been mercifully spared to us, is now over
one-and-twenty, and hopes to be a painter.

Since the withdrawal of "La Nonne Sanglante" I had done no dramatic
work; but I had written a short oratorio, called "Tobie," which George
Hainl (then conductor of the orchestra at the Grand Théâtre at Lyons)
had asked me to compose for one of his annual benefit concerts. This
oratorio, as it strikes me, has certain qualities both of sentiment and
of expression. Some attention was attracted by a somewhat touching air
for the youthful Tobias, and by several other passages which had a good
deal of pathos about them. In 1856 I made the acquaintance of Jules
Barbier and Michel Carré. I suggested to them to collaborate with me,
and trust me with a libretto. They agreed to do so in a very friendly
way. The first subject I put forward for collaboration was "Faust." The
idea pleased them both. We went to see Monsieur Carvalho, at that time
Director of the Théâtre Lyrique, in the Boulevard du Temple. He had just
brought out Victor Massé's "Reine Topaze," in which Madame
Miolan-Carvalho had achieved a striking success. Monsieur Carvalho
approved of our notion, and my two friends set to work at once. I had
myself done about half my share of the work, when Monsieur Carvalho
suddenly informed me that the Théâtre de la Porte Saint Martin was on
the point of bringing out a melodrama under the name of "Faust," and
that this fact completely upset his calculations with regard to our
work. He rightly thought we should never be ready before the Porte Saint
Martin, and even so, it would be imprudent to enter into competition
with a theatre whose well-known splendour as to _mise en scène_ would
draw half Paris just before our piece appeared.

He therefore begged us to choose some other subject, but this sudden
upset made it impossible for me to turn my thoughts into another
channel, and for more than a week I was unable to do any work at all.

At last Monsieur Carvalho asked me to write a comic opera, and to take
my subject from Molière. This was the origin of the "Médecin malgré
lui," which was produced at the Théâtre Lyrique on January 15, 1858, the
anniversary of Molière's birth.

The announcement of a comic opera from the pen of a musician whose
former ventures had been in such a different style seemed to bode
disappointment. But these fears (some of them were hopes perhaps?) were
not justified by the event, for the "Médecin malgré lui" was, _malgré
cela_, my first really successful opera.[15]

But all my delight was shattered by the death of my poor mother. She had
been ill for some months, and completely blind for two years previously.
She died on January 16, 1858, the very day after the first performance,
aged seventy-seven years and a half. Fate did not permit me to brighten
her last days with the fruit of my labour, and the just recompense of
the life she had so unceasingly devoted to her children and their
future. I can only hope that before she left us she knew and foresaw
that her struggle had not been in vain, and that her self-sacrifice had
brought a great reward.

The "Médecin malgré lui" had an uninterrupted run of a hundred nights.
The work was staged with the greatest care. Monsieur Got, of the Comédie
Française, was good enough, at the request of the Director, to bestow
his invaluable advice as to the traditional mounting of the piece and
the declamation of the spoken dialogue. The chief part, that of
Sganarelle, was played by the baritone Meillet, whose voice was full and
round, and his play spirited. He made a great success both as a singer
and an actor. The other male parts were taken by Girardot, Wartel,
Fromant, and Lesage (the two latter afterwards replaced by Potel and
Gabriel), and all in the very best manner. The two principal ladies'
parts were held by Mesdemoiselles Faivre and Girard, both of them full
of life and animation.

This score, the first comic work I ever did, is in a light and easy
style which savours of the Italian opera-bouffe. I have endeavoured to
recall the style of Lulli in certain passages, but the work as a whole
keeps to the modern forms, and belongs to the French school. Among the
numbers which most took the public taste were the "Chanson des
Glouglous," excellently sung by Meillet, and invariably encored; the
"Trio de la Bastonnade," the "Sextuor de la Consultation," a "Fabliau,"
the "Scène de Consultation des Paysans," and a duet for Sganarelle and
the nurse.

The Porte-Saint-Martin "Faust" had just been brought out; but all its
magnificent staging did not ensure the melodrama a very long run.
Monsieur Carvalho consequently reverted to our former plan, and I at
once set to work upon the opera which I had laid aside to write the
"Médecin."

My "Faust" was first put into rehearsal in September 1858. Before I left
Paris for Switzerland, where I was to spend the holidays with my wife
and son, then two years old, I had gone through the work with Monsieur
Carvalho in the Foyer of his theatre. At that time nothing had been
settled as to the cast, and Monsieur Carvalho had asked my leave to
bring his wife, who lived opposite the theatre, to hear me play over
the work. She was so struck with the _rôle_ of Marguerite, that Monsieur
Carvalho begged me to let her sing it. I was naturally only too
delighted, and the result proved my decision to have been something like
an inspiration.

All the same, the rehearsals of "Faust" were not fated to pursue "the
even tenor of their way" without many checks and difficulties. The tenor
who was to have played "Faust," although gifted with a beautiful voice
and a handsome presence, turned out not to be equal to so heavy a part.
A short time before the date fixed for the first performance, it became
necessary to find some one to take his place; and the part was offered
to Monsieur Barbot, who happened to be disengaged. Within a month Barbot
had mastered it and was ready to perform. So the opera was acted for the
first time on March 19, 1859.

Though "Faust" did not strike the public very much at first, it is the
greatest theatrical success I have ever had. Do I mean that it is the
best thing I have written? That I cannot tell. I can only reiterate the
opinion I have already expressed, that success is more the result of a
certain concatenation of favourable elements and successful conditions,
than a proof and criterion of the intrinsic value of a work. Public
favour is attracted in the first instance by outward appearances; all
inward and solid qualities can do is to retain and strengthen it. It
takes some time to grasp and absorb the innumerable details which go to
make up a drama.

Dramatic art is a branch of the art of portraiture; its function is to
delineate character, as that of the painter is to present feature and
attitude. Every lineament, all those momentary and fleeting inflections
which constitute that individual physiognomy known as a "personality,"
must be grasped and reproduced. Shakespeare's immortal figures of
Hamlet, Richard III., Othello, and Lady Macbeth are so true to the type
which each expresses, that they hold a real and living place in every
mind. Well may they be called "creations."

Dramatic music is ruled by the same laws, and cannot otherwise exist.
Its object, too, is to portray feature; but where painting conveys an
impression at a glance, music has to tell its story by degrees, and thus
often fails to produce the intended effect at a first hearing.

None of my previous works could have led the world to expect anything
like "Faust" from me; it was a surprise to the public, both as to style
and interpretation.

Of course the part of Marguerite was not the first in which Madame
Carvalho had found scope for that marvellous style and power of
execution which have set her in the highest place among contemporary
singers; but no previous _rôle_ had given her so fine an opportunity of
displaying the lyric and pathetic side of her gifts. Her Marguerite made
her reputation in this respect, and will always be one of the glories of
her brilliant career. Barbot sang the difficult part of Faust like the
great musician he is. Balanqué, who created the part of Mephistopheles,
was a clever actor, whose gesture, appearance, and voice admirably
suited that weird and diabolical personage. Although he somewhat
overacted the part, he made a great success. The smaller parts of Siebel
and Valentine were very creditably performed by Mademoiselle Faivre and
Monsieur Raynal.

As to the score itself, it raised such a whirlwind of debate and
criticism, that my hopes of a real success grew faint indeed.


LETTERS


I

MONSIEUR H. LEFUEL, _Poste Restante, Genoa_.

(If Monsieur Lefuel does not call for his letters at Genoa, kindly
forward to the Académie de France at Rome.)


VIENNA, _Monday, August 21, 1842_.

MY DEAR HECTOR,--Some week or so ago I had a letter from Hébert, to whom
I had written in the first instance from Vienna. He tells me you are
somewhere near Genoa, but cannot exactly tell me where. As you have
consistently neglected me, my dear fellow, all through my travels, and
as I found no news of you at either Florence, Venice, or Vienna, I was
obliged to ask a mutual friend whether he happened to know your address
and could let me have it. From Hébert's answer I gather he has been
luckier than I. He knew your whereabouts at anyrate, and could write to
you, and get news of you. Yet you were perfectly well aware, hateful old
monster that you are, that your sorrowing relation would have rejoiced
over even the veriest line from you. But not a scratch of your pen have
I seen all through my journey. So how was I to write to you? I longed to
always, and you never gave me a chance of doing it! As likely as not,
this letter will arrive and find you flown, which accounts for the
extreme precautions you may observe in the directions on my envelope.

If I were anywhere within reach, I should have a real good row with you.
What on earth are you thinking of? Has your patriarchal tenderness waxed
so faint that you feel no temptation to write your eldest-born a few of
those inspiring sentences he so deeply values? Even supposing you had
not had time to write, I might at all events have kept you posted about
many matters which interested me then, and do so still, and which would
not have been indifferent, I think, to you.

However, now I have had my grumble, dearest and best of friends and
patriarchs, I will forget your crimes, and grant you my hearty pardon. I
know right well how you detest all letter-writing; I know, too, that you
never waste your time. That fact was made so clear to me at Rome, that I
never dreamt of putting down your silence to laziness. So I will forget
everything, except our mutual friendship.

I have wanted for some time to let you hear of a bit of good fortune I
have had here. The Mass I wrote in Rome, for the King's fête-day at San
Luigi de Francesi, is to be performed, with full orchestra, here in
Vienna, on the 6th of September. This is a piece of luck which has never
fallen in the way of any other Academy student, and has only come in
mine through my having made acquaintance with some kindly artists, who
have introduced me to others who have special influence here.

I am working very hard; I see very few people, and seldom go out. I am
up to the eyes in a Requiem with full orchestral accompaniment, which
will probably be performed in Germany on November 2. The officials of
the church where my Roman Mass is to be given have already offered to
have my Requiem done as well. But as I am not yet quite certain whether
I shall think the rendering of the Mass satisfactory, I give no decided
answer for the present. Through my acquaintance with Madame Henzel and
with Mendelssohn, I might be able to secure a far finer performance of
the work in Berlin, and this would have the advantage of raising me much
higher in the opinion of my brother artists. But my hands are still
quite free as regards the Vienna performance. If I am satisfied with the
way my Mass is given on September 8, I shall let them do the Requiem
here; if not, I shall take it to Berlin. When Madame Henzel was in Rome,
she said to me, "When you come to Germany, my brother might be of the
greatest use to you, if you have any music you wish to have performed."

I wrote to her to Berlin some days ago, and as I mean to leave this on
September 12, and make a tour through Munich, Leipzig, Berlin, Dresden,
and Prague, I asked her to be good enough to tell me if she thought I
might hope to get any of my music performed in Berlin. When I get her
answer, I shall see my way clearer. If she says yes, I shall stop in
Berlin until the beginning of November, and then go straight back to
Paris; if she says no, I shall return to Vienna, to which place the
railway would get me back in four days. There is a line from Vienna to
Olmutz, which would save me about sixty leagues. If I have to stop in
Berlin for my Requiem, I shall travel by a different route; thus,
Munich, Prague, Dresden, and Leipzig to Berlin. In any case I will let
you know, as soon as I know myself.

I often regret our beautiful Rome, my dear Hector, and cordially do I
envy those who have the luck to be there still. I really think my
recollection of that lovely land is the chief charm and happiness of my
present life. If you only _knew_ what all the other countries I have
travelled through look like after Italy!

The last thing I saw, and it made a deep and lasting impression on me,
was Venice. You know all its beauties, so I will not go into long
descriptions or ecstasies of admiration. You know all my feelings on the
subject.

No doubt, dear friend, you have heard of the death of our comrade
Blanchard. Deeply as I regret him, I know your grief is greater still,
for you knew him far better even than I did. Such shadows are well-nigh
sure to fall on every meeting after prolonged separation, and,
commonplace as it may sound, there is something terribly indispensable
about that word which closes every letter one writes.

Farewell, dear friend, farewell! I greet you as friend greets friend,
nay, more, as brother greets brother. I hope _we_, at least, may meet
again! Good-bye.--Ever yours,

CHARLES GOUNOD.


II

MONSIEUR CHARLES GOUNOD, _47 Rue Pigalle, Paris_.

_November 19._

MY DEAR GOUNOD,--I have just gone through your choruses for "Ulysse"
with the greatest care. The work as a whole seems to me to have
considerable merit, and the interest of the music rises as that of the
drama intensifies. The double chorus of "the Banquet" is exceedingly
good, and will make a powerful effect if properly performed. I do not
think the Comédie Française can or will be at all stingy in the matter
of your orchestra. The music alone, to my mind, will suffice to draw the
public for a considerable number of nights, and it should therefore be
to the direct and pecuniary interest of the Director that a large
proportion of what is laid out on producing the play should be allocated
to the musical part of the work. I think this will turn out to be the
case. At the same time, do not give an inch on the matter. Get what you
want, or take nothing at all. Be very careful who you give your solos
to; one bad singer will utterly spoil the chances of a whole song.

Look at the page I have turned down; there is a mistake in the time,
just at the opening of a verse, which I think you would be wise to
alter. Men like you and me oughtn't to scan like that. We must leave
that sort of thing to people who don't know their work. Best and
sincerest good wishes.--Yours always,

H. BERLIOZ.


III

MONSIEUR HECTOR LEFUEL, _20 Rue du Tournon, Paris_.

MY DEAR HECTOR,--I called on you about a month ago to tell you a very
important piece of news, which you, in your well-earned quality of
friend and "father," have a right to know before anybody else. I am to
be married next month to Mademoiselle Agnes Zimmerman. We are all as
pleased as we can be, and I believe we may look forward to very solid
and lasting happiness. My future wife's family is very good and kind,
and I am lucky enough to be a general favourite there already.

I know, dear friend, you will be the first to congratulate me on this
new and happy prospect. But our joy must be tinged with sadness when we
think of the memories it must bring back to our poor Marthe[16], who
still mourns the love she prized so much and lost so soon. God grant the
sisterly affection my wife will give her may atone for the pangs the
sight of our new-found happiness may cause her! I feel quite sure I may
hope for this, for their two sweet natures are strongly drawn to each
other even now.

Good-bye, dear Hector. Always yours most affectionately. My best regards
to Madame Lefuel.

CHARLES GOUNOD.


IV

MONSIEUR PIGNY[17], _Rue d'Enghien, Paris_.

LUCERNE, _Tuesday, August 28, 1855_.

MY DEAR FRIEND PIGNY,--In my mother's letter, received to-day, she
speaks with deep and grateful emotion of your more than filial devotion
to her since my departure, and of the kindly care with which you offered
to see personally to all the details of her move from the country. It is
a considerable undertaking for an old lady like her, in spite of her
simple wants and habits.

You who worship two mothers, so they tell me--self-sacrifice and
renunciation (I use these names advisedly; I can find no other epithets
to express my meaning)--will understand me when I tell you that what you
do for her is the very tenderest and best thing you can do for me, for
you help and complete a work I can never accomplish to my fullest
satisfaction--I mean the endeavour to repay a tithe of the care, the
sacrifices, the anxiety, the devotion she has lavished on me through
many years of noble, patient, faithful toil. We have filled all her
life, in fact, and she, alas! can only fill a part of ours.

I assure you, dear Pigny, I am most deeply touched by this proof that
you already treat me as your friend. Apart from the universal affection
in which all here hold you, nothing could give you greater claim and
title to mine than the delicate deference and kindness you have so
gracefully shown my honoured and beloved mother.

CHARLES GOUNOD.





LATER LETTERS OF

CHARLES GOUNOD

1870-1871[18]


I

VARANGEVILLE, _Sunday, September 4_.

MY DEARS,--As you may well imagine, our dear grandmother is very
uncertain as to what she should do. You know kind Louisa Brown has
written pressingly and repeatedly to offer grandmamma a home at
Blackheath until she can settle down, and the invitation is specifically
extended to _you_ as well as to _ourselves_.

My own responsibility weighs heavy on me at this juncture. Persuasion or
dissuasion strike me as being equally serious in their results. I should
like to know dear Pigny's mind on the subject. As to my own ideas, here
they are.

If cruel fortune gives Prussia the victory (no easy matter, as it seems
to me), and if France is to be humiliated under a foreign conqueror, I
should never have courage, I confess, to go on living under the enemy's
yoke.

Well, granting the Emperor's captivity, MacMahon's defeat, and our loss
of eighty thousand men to be undoubted and accomplished facts, my first
duty, as it strikes me, is to convey our mother, my wife, and my two
children to London, as a _provisional arrangement_. Speak, then, good
Pigny! I hearken with all my ears!


II

8 MORDEN ROAD, BLACKHEATH, LONDON.

Yes, my dear fellow, you are perfectly right! The peace proposals
Prussia dreams of are a crying shame. But the shame, thank God, lies
wholly with the proposing party. They bring glory to those who reject
them.

Like you I feel, I will not say humiliated, but cut to the very heart by
the horrible misfortunes which have befallen our poor unhappy France. So
much so, that I keep wondering, every hour of the day, whether the duty
of those who are called to the honour and happiness of defending our
country is not less heavy than that you and I have to perform, and which
no man would choose if he felt he must blush for the performance of it.
Alas! dear friend, this once, at all events, in history, Frenchmen in
general have spilt their noble blood so gallantly, that the shame of
those who only think of their own personal safety clings to themselves
alone. But the glory of victory nowadays (for the first time, perhaps,
in this world's history) is won by machinery rather than by men, and
disasters will be weighed in the same balance. The Prussians have not
been braver than we. We have been less fortunate than they.

You know already, and I say it again, if you decide to re-enter any gate
of Paris, I will not let you go alone. Family life means something more
than mere family dinner!

Well, here we are at last, dear friend, in our new dwelling, after
eighteen days spent in the enjoyment of the simplest and sincerest
hospitality. Some Englishmen there are who will not let us Frenchmen
feel we are in England. The manner in which our good and kind friend
Brown has shared our trouble proves it.

But the external peace we have found here gives us no inward calm. The
longer this horrible bloody war of pride and extermination lasts, the
more do I feel my very heart-strings wrung with grief for my unhappy
country; and anything that seems to rouse me from my sad contemplation
of our beloved France, far from comforting me, as with kindness, stings
like an insult.

Oh, most unhappy earth! wretched home of the human race! where barbarism
not only still exists, but is taken for glory, and permitted to obscure
the pure and beneficent rays of the only true glory in existence, the
glory of love, of science, and of genius! Humanity yet lingers, it would
seem, under the grim shadows of chaos, amidst the monstrosities of the
iron age; and instead of driving their weapons into the earth to benefit
their fellow-creatures, men plunge them into each other's hearts to
decide the ownership of the actual soil. Barbarians! savages!

Ah, dear fellow, let me make an end, or I shall go on for ever, for very
sorrow!

The dear ones near me, who are dear to you too, are well. Would we could
have hidden them a little less far off--in Paris!


III

8 MORDEN ROAD, BLACKHEATH PARK, LONDON,
_Wednesday, October 12, 1870_.

DEAR FRIENDS,--As our correspondence is the only thing we have left to
help us struggle against the pain of separation, we ought, so far as
circumstances permit, to make the most of it; for we cannot be sure,
alas! that what can be done to-day will be possible to-morrow. So we
have settled with grandmamma that we will write in turn, as long as you
are at Varangeville. My turn falls to-day.

I have just seen a French newspaper, dear Pi, which reports that the
Sous-Préfet of Dieppe has posted an order forbidding any Frenchman under
sixty years of age to leave the country. So that you are now interned in
France, not by your own will only, but by order of the authorities. But
as I am not in France, and as I left before any such prohibition was
published, I should like you to let me know whether this order is
accompanied by another, which seems to me its inevitable corollary, or
rather its cause, and its logical explanation--I mean the calling out of
all able-bodied men under sixty years of age. For I fail to understand
an order not to leave France, as applied to men who are not to be called
on to defend the country. So I beg you will send me the
best-authenticated information you can come by. I will not let you carry
a rifle without shouldering mine alongside of you; and though I am a
poor shot, you need not fear my being so clumsy as to shoot you by
accident. We _must_ be side by side, if there is any question of either
of us going under fire. I have already told you so, and my own
inaptitude for military duty has nothing to do or to say in the
question. I have looked on the steps I have taken, up to this, as an
absolute duty. That duty would become merely relative, consequently
less, and therefore null and void, if another and a greater should
appear to over-ride it.

Our poor beloved country is in a very serious position--worse, as far as
I can see, than in any previous trial. Never before have the two great
problems of external struggle and internal union loomed so urgent or so
huge. I feel certain that internal union, in the face of the common
enemy, does actually exist. Whether it is merely temporary, or whether
it will continue after the struggle is over--whatever may be its
issue--that's the question! Victor or vanquished, will France emerge a
republic? In any case--whatever the resistance Paris makes, and her
ultimate fate--it will be long, I think, before France is utterly
devoured. The mouthful is a large one, and it may not turn out
altogether easy to break up.

Well, we all send our affectionate love. All friendly messages to your
kind hosts, and my affectionate respects to M. le Curé, whom I shall
never forget.


IV

_October 19, 1870_, 12.30 P.M.

MY DEAR ONES,--We are just going out with Mrs. Brown, who is coming in
her carriage to take us to the Crystal Palace. The fountains play to-day
for the last time this season, and she has set her heart on our seeing
them. As you may fancy, dear Pigny, I shall hardly realise what is going
on before my eyes. I can see nothing but our country. I see it clearer,
more incessantly than when I was within its borders!

Ah! dear friend, will no one rise up and lead our brave-hearted
Frenchmen on some steady line of conduct? Failing that, even the most
heroic courage will avail us nothing. See how, one by one, one after the
other, as though by some strange unheard-of fate, they all fall into the
jaws of that huge automaton, that monstrous hydra-headed artillery!
Every one of them founders in that hostile ocean, dashing gallantly and
ceaselessly against that ever-growing mountain of cannon, and shot, and
shell, and strange engines of war, and battalions that seem to start
ready armed out of the earth wherever the enemy chances to need them!
and meanwhile our generals are being dismissed, or moved from one
command to another,--they are left without orders, and thrown on their
own resources, to take the chance of whatever their private or personal
inspiration may dictate. Three thousand men cut up, to the last man, in
a desperate hopeless defence of the Orléans railway station, all
unconscious that the opposing force numbers five-and-thirty thousand!!
Surely it is sheer madness thus to cast the blood, and bravery, and
downright heroism of these splendid fellows into the outer darkness of
what fate (or is it mere chance?) may bring!

We ought _all_ to be standing face to face with the Prussians at this
moment. Every one of us, or not a soul! And it astounds me that three
million Frenchmen and thirty thousand cannon were not summoned, over a
month ago, under one and the same flag (not that of France alone, but of
humanity in general), to repulse this invasion of machines rather than
of men! Here comes Mrs. Brown. Good-bye for awhile!


V

8 MORDEN ROAD, BLACKHEATH PARK,
_Tuesday, November 8, 1870_.

DEAR EDOUARD,--We are just going to change houses again. We leave Morden
Road next Saturday for London, where my work and engagements render my
presence indispensable. I must get back to work--and to useful work. I
cannot let myself pine and dwindle any longer in endless, hopeless
sorrow. In another month I should be utterly incapable.

If I can write, and sell what I write, I will sell my work.

If I have to give lessons, I will teach: for the armistice is breaking
down, and nobody knows what winter may bring with it. So our poor
little flock is scattered, dear fellow! Not in heart indeed, but in
body; and "Je ne suis pas de ceux qui disent ce n'est rien!... Je dis
que c'est beaucoup!" as old La Fontaine has it.

Tell my dear little Guillaume how much his letters are treasured, not
only by the loving heart of his grandmother, but by his uncle, who
watches and follows every symptom of his tastes, every instinct of his
nature, everything that bears upon his future, every thought--all those
inner workings, in a word, which constitute the continuation of a
youth's mental evolution and ultimate development--with an affectionate
solicitude which I venture to call almost maternal. Everything I notice
in him is good, and augurs well; and I believe the serious and even
tragic events amid the tumult of which his young life has opened will
have endued all his good qualities with a maturity which peace might
only have brought them twenty years later.

Everybody here is well. Jean and Jeanne send their affectionate love to
their uncle and cousin.


VI

MY DEAR PI,--So our hopes are dashed again, by the final rupture of the
armistice, which, as it had seemed to me, was strengthened by all M.
Thiers' consummate powers as a negotiator, and for which the Government
was willing to make every concession to which a self-respecting nation
could condescend.

And what will happen now? Alas! the thought overwhelms me. But though I
cannot turn my heart and mind from the misfortunes of our beloved
country, I feel I must make a desperate appeal to my powers of work, to
my duty, to my _usefulness_. Useful I can be to my near and dear ones
(for I must support them), and useful, too, to myself--for I must shake
free of the slow agony which has been on me ever since we got here, and
which would utterly consume me if I did not call together all my
remaining strength, to make a struggle against the _invasion of my own
morale_.

I shall therefore, as events seem likely, for some time to come, to
render our return to France impossible, spend the winter in finishing,
or at all events in carrying on my present work,[19] so that when the
waters go back I may open the window of my ark and let my dove (which
may perhaps turn out to be a raven!) fly out. In any case, it will mean
that the rainbow has come back, and with it peace among the nations.

Would you were with us, my dear ones! How we are scattered this winter!


VII

LONDON, _December 24, 1870_.

DEAR FRIENDS,--This is the eve of a great day here, which English people
keep as we do New Year's Day. And I must confess that to me Christmas,
which brings back the greatest of all dates to our memory, opens the
year much more appropriately than our "Jour de l'An." Alas! whichever
way we take it, what a year of pain this which is just about to close
has been, to each and all of us, parted as we are, after so many
misfortunes endured, in anxieties such as still beset us, and amid the
dread of what may yet befall us. Our very hearts have groaned and
suffered for the last five months, unceasingly. For five whole months
humanity has gazed on a horrid sight--the most merciless work of
destruction, carried on in a century which proudly arrogates to itself
the title of "Progress," but the memory of which will go down to
posterity stained with the most revolting atrocities. What is progress,
forsooth, but the onward march of intelligence, in the light of love?
And what has this century done, I will not say for the pleasure, but for
the happiness of the human race?

Napoleon I.! Napoleon III.! William of Prussia! Waterloo! mitrailleuses!
Krupp guns!...

In what a scene of ruin shall we meet! We have been physically parted,
but our hearts have never been severed! far from it! It seems as though
this hard and cruel apprenticeship must knit us closer to everything
that makes life real, and sure, and steadfast. So my heart yearns to
yours now, in absence, more tenderly, more clingingly, than it ever did
in happier times! We shall all feel our meeting even more than we should
have if we had never been so far apart. Fondest love to each and all of
you--to Berthe, to you, dear Pi, to all our friends.


VIII

_December 28, 1870._

MY DEAR EDOUARD,--A sad New Year's Day we shall all have, scattered as
we are, and have been for so long! Homeless, parted from our nearest and
dearest, our friends all gone or scattered too, in constant anxiety
about the wellbeing, the health, the very existence of those we love,
thousands of lives cut off, and careers destroyed, or checked, or
hampered--of families brought to ruin, provinces ravaged and harried,
and nothing decisive to show at the end of it all. There you have the
sum total, the last will and testament of this dying year, which has
devoured countless victims, and spread disaster far and wide--the result
at this present moment of "Human Progress." If the tree should be judged
by its fruits, and if, as undoubtedly is the case, the value of a cause
is to be measured by that of its effect, we must admit, considering what
it has brought us to, that human wisdom has gone sadly astray, and that
human reason, for the emancipation of which we have been so jealous,
does no great credit either to its independence or its own teachings. If
all our misfortunes end by giving us a lesson, by bringing us back to
the simplicity of truth, and the truth of simplicity, they will not be
utterly wasted, and we shall have gained a somewhat both precious and
beneficent. For all things proceed from each other, here below; truth
and falsehood each have their inevitable consequences. According to the
tree, so shall its fruit be. What will the year 1871 bring us? I know
not; but it seems to me it must be a decisive year, for good or for
evil, not for us only, but for Europe--for what is known as the
civilised world. We _must_ learn at last _where_ we really are. It is
high time that the nations should make sure wherein their life lies, and
their death--what their strength is, and their weakness--whence they may
look for light, or darkness--how they may escape all temporary shifts,
and settle down on firm and durable foundations. This is the method in
all sciences; and politics is a science, which must have a basis and
constructive system of its own.

Well, well! Best love to Anna and to grandmamma.


IX

_Thursday, March 16, 1871._

DEAREST BERTHE,--Your letter of the 13th only reached us this morning.
It has grieved us sorely. Our dreary winter will close sadly indeed,
what with our dear mother's departure, the reasons which make that step
wise and even necessary, the thought of how all she will see must wring
her heart, and our own disappointment at not having you here for a
while, as we had hoped.

If I was not bound until the 1st of May by the engagements I have made
in London for that date, I should have started, and so would Anna and
her children, with my mother. Duty, in the shape of earning a few
crusts, forbids my moving yet, but we shall be on our way to join you
before the first week in May is over. In spite of the very favourable
welcome, and the artistic position my work has earned me here, I feel
this country is not my France, and I believe, being a particularly human
person, that my French nature and habits are too old to be modified by
transplanting; I shall live and die essentially _a Frenchman_. The day
is yet far distant when the sense of the whole earth being his
fatherland will predominate in the heart of man over love for the soil
of his country.

My tenderest greeting to you both.


X

LONDON, April 14, 1871.

DEAR FRIEND,--Your letter of the 12th has just reached me, and I reply
at once, in the hope that my answer may be at Versailles in time to
welcome you on your return to the dear fraternal roof, and that thus
your two brothers may each greet you after his fashion--one in his
peaceful garden, the other by these few lines from the other side of the
sea; one opening his door to you, the other stretching out his arms;
both taking you to their hearts. How large the place you hold there, you
know right well! Alas! dear friend, dear brother, I too hear the
terrible guns whose booming grieves your soul and breaks your heart, as
well it may! As step by step I follow the progress of events, and the
various phases of this conflict, or rather of the utter bedlam which
causes and maintains it, I watch the gradual disappearance--I will not
say of my illusions (the word is not worthy to express my meaning, nor
should I mourn over it as I do), but of my hopes, present or near, at
all events, of the approaching erection of a new _story_ in the building
of the moral habitation men call "Liberty," the only dwelling, after
all, worthy of the human race. No, again I say it, these are no
illusions which are fading from our sight! Liberty is no dream; it is
our Canaan, a true land of promise. But, like the Jews, we shall only
see it afar off. To enter it, we must become God's own people. Liberty
is as real as heaven. It is a heaven on earth--the country of the elect;
but it must be earned, and conquered, not by oppression, but by
self-devotion; not by pillage, but by generosity; not by taking life,
but by bestowing it, in the moral as well as the material sense.
Morally, above all; for once that is well understood and ascertained,
the material side of the question will take care of itself. The _man's_
hygiene must come first, his animal welfare second--that is the just,
and therefore the logical course.

When I consider the outcome (so far at least) of all the moral gifts,
all the advances on trust, as it were, of which humanity, political and
social, has been the recipient, up till this present day, I cannot help
observing that it has been treated like a spoilt child. I feel inclined
to doubt whether a wise and opportune distribution of all those gifts
which cannot be appreciated and utilised till the human race comes of
age, has not been anticipated with reckless and imprudent prodigality.
We still stand in need of _overseers_. Well, master for master, take it
all in all, I would rather have _one_ than _two hundred thousand_. You
can always get rid of one tyrant (natural death, what we call _la belle
mort_, will do that for you); but a collective tyranny, compact,
endlessly reproductive, feeding and fattening perpetually on its own
victims!--I can never believe that is God's chosen model of human
evolution. Now, if we carry the argument to its conclusion, we come to
this: "Liberty is merely the voluntary and conscious accomplishment of
justice." And as justice is obedience to eternal and unchanging laws, it
follows that where there is freedom there must be submission. This is
the end of the argument, and the basis of all life. I should go on
twaddling for ever (and so would you), but I must not forget mine is
not the only letter this envelope is to hold.

So I will send my affectionate love to you and Berthe.--Your brother,

CH. GOUNOD.




BERLIOZ


In the ranks of human nature certain peculiarly sensitive beings are to
be found, whom circumstances affect after a fashion utterly distinct,
both in nature and degree, from the results they produce on other men.
These individuals form the inevitable exception to an otherwise
invariable rule. Their natural idiosyncrasies explain the peculiar
features of their various lives, and to these lives again their ultimate
fate may fairly be ascribed.

Now the exceptional men and women lead the world. This is inevitable,
for their struggle and their suffering is the price of the enlightenment
and progress of humanity at large. Once these intellectual pioneers have
dropped on the road they have hewed out--oh! then troops up the flock of
imitators, full of the pride of breaking down the already opened door;
every separate sheep of them, as vainglorious as the legendary fly on
the coach-wheel, loudly claiming the honour and glory of having won
triumph for the Revolution. "J'ai tant fait que nos gens sont enfin dans
la plaine!" Like Beethoven, Berlioz was one of the illustrious sufferers
from that painful privilege of being an exceptional man. Dearly did he
pay for the heavy responsibility! The exceptional man must suffer. Fate
wills it thus, and, as invariably, he must bring suffering on others.
How can the common herd (that _profanum vulgus_ so execrated by the poet
Horace) be expected to acknowledge its own incompetence and bow down
before any insignificant though audacious person who dares stand out
boldly against inveterate custom and the sovereign rule of
old-established routine? Did not Voltaire (a clever man, if ever there
was one) declare that no one person was as clever as all the rest put
together? And is not universal suffrage, the great achievement of these
modern days, the irrevocable verdict of the sovereign populace? Does not
the voice of the people equal the voice divine?

History, meanwhile, with its steady onward march, which from time to
time exposes many a counterfeit--history, I say, teaches us that
everywhere, and invariably, light proceeds from the individual to the
multitude, and never from the multitude to the individual; from the
wise to the ignorant, never from the ignorant to the wise; from the sun
to the planet, never from the planet to the sun. You cannot expect
thirty-six millions of blind men to do the work of one telescope, or
thirty-six millions of sheep that of one shepherd! Was it the world at
large that formed Raphael and Michael Angelo, Mozart and Beethoven,
Newton and Galileo? The world!--which spends its life making and
unmaking its own judgments, in a perpetual alternate condemnation of its
own infatuations and prejudices. How can the world judge anything? Would
you erect such wavering contradictory decrees into an infallible
jurisdiction? The very thought is laughable. The world's first impulse
is to scourge and crucify. Long afterwards, in the next generation
oftener than not, or a still later one, a tardy repentance reverses the
judgment, and the laurels denied to the living genius fall like rain
upon his tomb. The only true and definite sentence, that of posterity,
is but the accumulated judgment of successive minorities. Majorities are
the "preservers of the _statu quo_." I do not blame them. They probably
fulfil their true function in the general order of things. They may keep
the chariot back. They certainly do not help it onwards. They act as a
drag, when they do not play the part of ruts upon the path. Immediate
success is often enough a mere question of fashion. It proves a work to
be on a level with the age; it by no means argues any long survival.
There is no great reason, then, for being proud of it.

Berlioz was a very single-minded man, ignorant of all arts of concession
or compromise. Belonging, as he did, to the race of _Alcestis_,
naturally enough the hand of every _Orontes_ was against him. And how
many "Orontes" there are in this world! People called him crotchety,
surly, quarrelsome, what not! But surely those who complained of this
extreme sensitiveness, often amounting to excessive irritability, should
have made some allowance for the annoyances, the personal suffering, the
innumerable rebuffs endured by a proud-hearted man, to whom any mean
compliance or cringing servility was utterly impossible. Though his
opinions may have seemed hard and severe to those concerning whom they
were expressed, they never, at all events, can be attributed to any
shameful or jealous motive. Such feelings were quite incompatible with
the nobility of that great and generous and loyal nature. The trials
endured by Berlioz when competing for the Grand Prix de Rome were the
faithful image, and, as it were, the prophetic prelude to those he was
to face all through his career. He actually competed four times over,
and he was twenty-seven when, by dint of his own perseverance, and in
spite of the innumerable difficulties he had to overcome, he won the
prize, in the year 1830.

The very year which saw him carry off the prize with his cantata
"Sardanapale" also saw the execution of a work which demonstrated the
point his artistic development (so far as musical conception, colour,
and experience are concerned) had reached. His "Symphonic Fantastique"
("episode dans la vie d'un artiste") was a real event in the musical
world, the importance of which may be gauged by the fanatical admiration
and the violent opposition it aroused. Admitting that a work of such a
nature may be open to much discussion, the fact that its composer
possessed most remarkable inventive power, and a powerful poetic
sentiment (which reappears in all his subsequent compositions), still
remains evident.

Berlioz has put into musical circulation, so to speak, a large number
of orchestral effects and combinations which were unknown before his
time, and which have been adopted by very illustrious musicians indeed.
He has revolutionised the art of instrumentation, and in that respect,
at all events, may be said to have "founded a school." And yet, in spite
of certain brilliant successes both in France and elsewhere, his whole
life was a struggle. In spite of performances to which his personal
guidance as an orchestral conductor of great eminence and his
indefatigable energy added many chances of success and many elements of
brilliance, his personal public was always a limited one. The great
public, that "everybody" which turns _success_ into _popularity_, never
knew him. Popularity was so slow in coming to Berlioz that he died of
the delay. The end came at last, with the "Troyens," a work which, as he
foresaw, caused him a world of sorrow. Like his namesake and his hero,
he may be said to have perished before the walls of Troy. Every
impression, every sensation Berlioz underwent was carried to an extreme.
He knew no joy or sorrow short of downright delirium. As he himself
would say, he was a "volcano." Extreme sensibility carries one as far
in suffering as in delight. Tabor and Golgotha are not far apart.
Happiness no more consists in the absence of suffering than genius
implies freedom from all faults.

Men of genius must and do suffer, but they need no pity. They know
raptures which are a sealed book to others, and if they have wept for
sadness, they have shed tears of ineffable joy as well. That in itself
constitutes a heaven that can never be too dearly bought.

Berlioz was one of the greatest emotional influences of my youth. Older
than myself by fifteen years, he was a man of four-and-thirty when I, a
lad of nineteen, studied composition under Halévy at the Conservatoire.
I recollect the impression his person and his works (which he often
rehearsed in the concert-room of the Conservatoire) produced on me. The
moment Halévy had corrected my work I used to fly from the class-room,
and lie low in some corner of the concert-hall, and there remain,
intoxicated by the weird, passionate, tumultuous strains, which seemed
to open new and brilliant worlds to me. One day, I remember, I had been
listening to a rehearsal of his "Romeo and Juliet" Symphony, then
unpublished, and which was shortly to be given in public for the first
time. I was so struck by the grandeur and breadth of the great finale of
the "Reconciliation des Montaigus et des Capulets," that when I left the
hall my memory retained the whole of Friar Lawrence's splendid phrase,
"Jurez tous par l'auguste symbole." A few days afterwards I went to see
Berlioz, and sitting down to the piano, I played the whole passage over
to him. He opened his eyes very wide, and looking hard at me, he asked--

"Where the devil did you hear that?"

"At one of your rehearsals," I replied. He could hardly believe his
ears.

The sum total of Berlioz' work is very considerable. Thanks to the
initiative of two courageous orchestral leaders (M. Jules Pasdeloup and
M. Édouard Colonne), the present public has already become acquainted
with several of the great composer's vast conceptions--the "Symphonic
Fantastique," the "Romeo and Juliet" Symphony, the "Harold Symphony,"
the "Enfance du Christ," three or four great overtures, and, above all,
that magnificent work the "Damnation de Faust," which in the course of
the last two years has roused such transports of enthusiasm as would
have stirred the artist's very ashes, if the dead could stir. But what a
mine remains yet unexplored! Shall we never hear his "Te Deum," in all
its grandeur of conception? And will no director produce that charming
opera, "Beatrix et Bénédict?" Such an attempt nowadays, when opinion has
so veered round to Berlioz' side, would have every chance of success.
Though no particular merit on the score of risk encountered could be
claimed, it might be wise to seize the favourable opportunity. The
following letters have a double charm. They are all unpublished
hitherto, and every one of them has been written in the spirit of
absolute sincerity, which is the eternally indispensable condition of
true friendship. Some may deplore the lack of deference they betray with
respect to men whose talents should apparently shield them from
irreverent and unjust description. People will say, and not
unreasonably, that Berlioz would have done better not to style Bellini a
"little blackguard," and that the appellation of "illustrious old
gentleman" as applied to Cherubini, with evidently ill-natured intent,
was very inappropriate to the eminent composer whom Beethoven
considered the greatest of his age, and to whom he, Beethoven, the
mighty symphonist, paid the signal honour of humbly submitting the MS.
of the "Messe Solennelle" (Op. 123), with the request that he would
freely express his opinion concerning it. Be that as it may, and in
spite of blots for which the writer's cross-grained temper is alone
responsible, the letters are most deeply interesting. Berlioz bares his
heart in them, as it were. He lets himself go; he enters into the most
intimate details of his private and artistic life. In a word, he opens
his whole heart to his friend, and that in terms of such effusive warmth
and affection as prove how worthy each was of the other's friendship,
and how complete the mutual understanding was. To understand each other!
How the word calls up that immortal fable of our heaven-sent La
Fontaine, "Les deux Amis."

To understand! to enter into that perfect communion of heart and thought
and interest to which we give the two fairest names in human
language--friendship and love. Therein lies life's whole charm, and the
most powerful attraction, too, in that _written life_, that
conversation betwixt parted friends which is so appropriately known as
"correspondence."

The musical works of Berlioz may earn him glory. The published letters
will do more. They will earn him love, and that is the most precious of
all earthly things.

CHARLES GOUNOD.




M. CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS AND HIS OPERA "HENRI VIII."


When, after years of perseverance and struggle, a highly gifted artist
gains the exalted place in public opinion to which he is justly
entitled, everybody, even his most obstinate opponent, exclaims, "Didn't
I always say people would end by coming round?"

Five and twenty years ago, or more (for he came out as an infant
prodigy), M. Saint-Saëns made his first appearance in the musical world.
How many times since then have I been told: "Saint-Saëns? Eh? Now
really? Oh, as a pianist or an organist, I dare say. But as a composer!
Do you really and truly think?..." And all the rest of the usual
stereotyped phrases. Well, I _did_ think so, really and truly; and I was
not the only person who did. Now everybody else thinks so too.
Misgivings have all faded away, prejudices are all dispelled--M.
Saint-Saëns has won. He has only to say, "J'y suis, j'y reste," and he
will be one of the glories of his time and of his art.

According to admitted opinion among certain artists, if a man speaks
well of a brother artist's work, the natural inference is that he thinks
ill of it, and _vice versâ_. But why? Must you refuse to admit other
men's talent or genius in order to prove your own? Did Beethoven slay
Mozart? Will Rossini prevent Mendelssohn from living on? Do you believe
that, as Celimène says in the play, "C'est être savant que trouver à
redire"?

Are you afraid there will not be room enough for you? Pray calm that
fear! There will always be room and to spare in the Temple of Fame. If
your place is marked there, it awaits you. The great point is that you
should come and take it.

No; the real dread is that of not being foremost Alack! this fretful,
nervous preoccupation concerning relative value is the very antithesis
of real merit. It is the same shabby old story--love of self usurping
the place and duty of love in the true sense. Let us love our art. Let
us fight, in all honesty and boldness, for any man or woman who serves
it bravely and nobly. Let us not hold truth "captive in the hand of
injustice." That which we strive to conceal to-day will surely be in
public knowledge on the morrow. The only honourable course is to prepare
that judgment of posterity, the _vox populi, vox Dei_, which ranks no
man by favour, or, what is worse, by interest, but gives sentence in
true justice, infallible and eternal.

To keep back the truth, proves that we do not love it. To grieve because
some other man serves truth better than ourselves, proves that we would
have the honour due to truth alone paid to our own persons.

Let us rather do all we can to diffuse the light of truth. We never can
have too much of it.

M. Saint-Saëns is one of the most astonishingly gifted men, as regards
musical powers, I have ever met with. He is armed at all points. He
knows his business thoroughly. I need only remark that he uses his
orchestra, and plays with it, just as he plays on and with his piano.

He possesses the gift of description in the highest and rarest degree.
He has an enormous power of assimilation. He can write you a work in any
style you choose--Rossini's, Verdi's, Schumann's, Wagner's. He knows
them all thoroughly--the surest safeguard, it may be, against his
imitating any. He never suffers from that bugbear of the
chicken-hearted, the dread of not making his effect. He never
exaggerates; thus he is never far-fetched, nor violent, nor
over-emphatic. He uses every combination and every resource without
abuse, and without being enslaved by any one of them.

He is no pedant. There is no solemnity, no _transcendentalism_ about
him. He is too childish still, and has grown far too wise, for that. He
has no special system; he belongs to no party or clique. He does not set
up to be a reformer of any sort. He writes as he _feels_ and _knows_.
Mozart was no reformer either, and, as far as I am aware, that fact has
not prevented his reaching the highest pinnacle of his art.

Another virtue (and one I desire to emphasise in these days), M.
Saint-Saëns writes music _that keeps time_, without perpetually dragging
out over those silly and detestable pauses which make any proper musical
construction impossible, and which are a mere maudlin affectation. He is
simply a thoroughbred musician, who draws and paints with all the
freedom of a master-hand; and if originality consists in never
imitating another, there can be no doubt about it in his case.

I do not propose in this place to go into all the details of the
libretto of "Henri VIII." The various newspaper reports of the first
performance have already performed that duty; and besides, the story (I
had almost said of that crowned hog!) of that practised Bluebeard and
conceited and contemptible theologian is known to everybody. Nothing
less than the triple crown sufficed his ambition, and the thought of the
Pope disturbed his mind as much, at all events, as any woman, or strong
drink, even.

But storm and threats availed him nothing. The Papacy has been blustered
at in every key, but it still slumbers on peacefully in its bark, which
no tempest seems able to submerge.

M. Saint-Saëns has given us no overture to this opera. This is certainly
not because he lacked symphonic skill. Of that he has already given us
superabundant proof. The work opens with a prelude based on an English
theme, which will reappear as the principal one in the finale of the
third act.

This prelude introduces us to the actual drama. In the very first scene,
between Norfolk and Don Gomez, the Spanish Ambassador to Henry VIII.'s
Court, a charming air occurs, "La beauté que je sers." It has a ring of
youth about it, and the close, on the words, "Bien que je ne la nomme
pas," is quite exquisitely simple.

In the first act the most remarkable numbers are a chorus of gentlemen
discussing Buckingham's sentence; the King's air, "Qui donc commande
quand il aime?" wonderfully truthful in expression; Anne Boleyn's
_entrée_--a graceful _ritournelle_, leading up to a charming chorus for
female voices, "Salut à toi qui nous viens de la France," which is
followed by a passage quite out of the common both as regards the music
itself and the scenic effect. I refer to the funeral march, when
Buckingham is borne to his last home, in which the _De Profundis_ is
interwoven in a superlatively talented manner with the asides of the
King and of Anne Boleyn in front; while the orchestra, as well as the
monarch, whispers the caressing phrase which is to reappear in the
course of the opera, "Si tu savais comme je t'aime!" in the young
maid-of-honour's ear. This fine scene closes with a masterly ensemble,
treated with great dramatic breadth, and which fitly and nobly crowns
the first act.

The second act is laid in Richmond Park. It opens with a charming
prelude--exquisitely dainty and clear in instrumentation--introducing a
delightful theme which reappears later on in the duet between the King
and Anne Boleyn, one of the most remarkable passages in the whole score.

After a soliloquy for Don Gomez, offering some fine opportunities for
declamation, Anne Boleyn appears, with the ladies of the Court, who
offer her flowers. This scene is full of charm and refinement. Then
comes a short scene for Anne and Don Gomez, and then her great duet with
the King. This duet is a very remarkable piece of writing. It throbs
with impatient sensuality, concealed by an instrumentation full of the
suggestion of feline caresses. The last ensemble is exquisite--well-nigh
unapproachable in sonority and charm. The next air, "Reine! je serai
reine!" gives a fine impression of a woman's intoxicated pride. In the
duet between Anne Boleyn and Katherine of Aragon the expression given to
the feelings of that noble-minded, unhappy Queen, alternately proud and
tenderly forgiving, is very striking.

The third act represents the Council Chamber. It opens with a stately
march, accompanying the entrance of the Court and the Judges. Then
commences a superb full chorus, "Toi qui veilles sur l'Angleterre,"
after which Henry VIII. addresses the Synod, "Vous tous qui m'écoutez,
gens d'Eglise et de loi!" Katherine, sorely agitated, scarcely able to
speak, advances, and beseeches the King to have pity on her. This
passage, in which the chorus occasionally joins, is most true and
touching in feeling. In the face of the King's cruel scorn of his
unhappy Queen, Don Gomez rises, and declares that as a Spaniard he
undertakes the defence of his mistress. In his rage, Henry VIII. appeals
to his subjects, "les fils de la noble Angleterre," who proclaim
themselves ready to accept the decree of Heaven, about to be delivered
by the Archbishop of Canterbury: "Nous déclarons nul et contraire aux
lois, l'hymen à nous soumis."

Katherine rebels, and in a transport of indignant pride she cries,
"Peuple que de ton roi déshonore le crime--tu ne te lèves pas!"

This passage is very striking and impressive. Katherine appeals to
posterity, and goes out with Don Gomez.

The Legate enters, and then comes the great scene with which the third
act closes.

In his hand the Legate holds the Papal Bull--

    "Au nom de Clément VII. pontife souverain."

The King, driven to extremities, commands that the Palace gates shall be
thrown open, and the populace admitted.

    "Vous plait-il recevoir des lois de l'étranger?
                      Non! Jamais!
     Vous convient-il qu'un homme
     Dont le vrai pouvoir est à Rome
     Sur mon trône ose m'outrager?
                      Non! Jamais!

And the King proclaims himself Head of the English Church, and takes
Anne Boleyn, Marchioness of Pembroke, to wife!

This splendidly managed scene winds up with a stirring chorus, "C'en est
donc fait! il a brisé sa chaine," worked out on the theme of the
national air already appearing in the prelude which takes the place of
overture to the opera.

The fourth act is also divided into two parts. The first is laid in Anne
Boleyn's chamber. The curtain rises on a graceful song and dance, during
which Norfolk and Surrey carry on an aside conversation very ingeniously
interwoven with the dance-music. The next scene, between Anne and Don
Gomez, has a charming air, sung with much expression by M. Dereims. A
dialogue between the King and Don Gomez closes this first part.

The second shows us a huge apartment in the banished Queen Katherine's
lodging at Kimbolton Castle. The touch of a master-hand is evident all
through these closing scenes of M. Saint-Saëns' opera. They are instinct
with incomparable power.

There is an admirable truth and sincerity in the Queen's soliloquy, full
of tender and mournful expression. She presently distributes some of her
belongings as keepsakes to her waiting-women. This little scene, almost
domestic in its familiarity, is ennobled by the deep feeling with which
the author has inspired it. Thus does truth elevate everything it
touches!

Next comes the magnificent scene between Queen Katherine and Anne
Boleyn. Mdlle. Krauss's comprehension and rendering of the Queen's
superb note of indignation marked the consummate tragedian; her acting
of the part rose to a striking level both of expression and of power.

The final numbers of this second and closing part form what is known in
theatrical parlance as the _clou_ of the drama. It is overwhelming.
Never did curtain fall on anything more thrilling. Situation, music,
singing, acting, all contribute to the powerful impression caused by
this splendid scene--which called forth thunders of applause.

Such, as far as so hasty a description can give any idea of it, is M.
Camille Saint-Saëns' new work.

As for the performers--every one of them fully equal to their task--we
must first mention those who played the three principal parts: Mdlle.
Krauss (Katharine of Aragon), Mdlle. Richard (Anne Boleyn), and M.
Lassalle (Henry VIII.). Next come M. Boudouresque (the Papal Legate), M.
Dereims (Don Gomez), M. Lorrain (Norfolk), M. Sapin (Surrey), and M.
Gaspard (Archbishop of Canterbury).

Mdlle. Krauss was full of grandeur, nobility, and royal dignity. Both as
actress and as singer, she proved her wonderful power of pathos. In the
final scene especially, she sang, acted, _suffered_, with a truthfulness
and intensity of expression which literally overwhelmed the onlookers
with the sense of its reality. What a splendid artiste! What numberless
parts she has identified with herself! How gallantly she plays them all!
What a place she holds on our stage! What a void her absence would
leave!

The part of Anne Boleyn gave Mdlle. Richard the opportunity of
displaying all the charm of her full and beautiful voice, the rich tone
of which is never strained by the wisely and well written music of her
part.

M. Lassalle gave that of Henry VIII. all the interest of his clear
diction and articulation; of a play that was sometimes gloomy and
forbidding and sometimes impassioned; and of that rare voice of his,
equally gifted in every shade of strength and softness.

M. Boudouresque would seem to have been born to be a Cardinal (_pace_
the diabolic Bertram and the Huguenot Marcel, whom he represents so
skilfully)! He looks as if he had been sent into the world to play
Princes of the Church--_vide_ Brogni in "La Juive," and this Papal
Legate in "Henri VIII.," whom he invests with most imposing dignity.

M. Dereims, as Don Gomez, was remarkable for elegance and charm.

The orchestra, under M. Altès, was admirable; as was also the chorus,
carefully taught and led by M. Jules Cohen.

M. Vaucorbeil, too, deserves a place of honour. He believed in M.
Saint-Saëns, and as soon as he became Director of the Opera, he
expressed a desire to see his work on our chief lyric stage. As is his
custom, the truly artistic Director devoted all his intelligent care and
attention to producing this noble and serious work; while yet another
true artist, M. Régnier, gave it the benefit of all the scenic
experience his long and brilliant theatrical career has brought him.

So, dear Saint-Saëns, you now behold your name linked with a work which
has earned most signal honour for French art and for our National
Academy of Music. To those who knew you as a child (myself among the
number) your destiny was never doubtful. Musically speaking, you never
had any childhood. Watchfully cherished as you were by your wise and
noble-hearted mother, your earliest years were nourished by the great
masters of your art. They set your feet boldly and firmly on your onward
path. Your reputation has long since outstripped that order of
popularity which is apparently the special privilege of the dramatic
stage. The only thing lacking to give it weight was a brilliant
theatrical success. That is now yours.

Forward then, dear and great musician! You have won all along the line.
Posterity will be faithful to your work, because you are true to your
art! God has gifted you with the master's knowledge and the master-hand!
May they long be preserved to you, for your sake and for ours!




NATURE AND ART


_Paper read by_ M. CHARLES GOUNOD, _Member of the Académie des Beaux
Arts, at the Annual Public Meeting of the Five Académies, October_ 23,
1886.


Gentlemen,--The successive transformations of which this earth has been
the scene, and which form its history--I had almost said its
education--since it dropped from its place amongst the solar nebulæ to
take up a more distinct position in space, are so many chapters, as it
were, in that great law of progress, that perpetual _tending_, which
seems to draw all creation towards some mysterious goal, and whose
various phases have been summed up in three general orders which have
been designated _ages_, and which denote the three hitherto most evident
phases of existence on our globe. But the book was not closed here, and
earth's history was not to end with these three earliest forms of life.
A fourth, the Human Age (for thus science permits me to call it), was to
reign in this unconscious kingdom. The huge travail of evolution, the
tremendous effort of parturition in which the plan of the Creator is
unfolded, was to be taken up by man at the point to which his
forerunners had carried it, and to be brought, by the exercise of nobler
functions, to a yet higher destiny. The law of life, of which earth's
creatures had so far been the more or less passive but utterly
irresponsible depositaries, was to be _confided_ to man's care, he being
raised to the supreme honour of voluntarily accomplishing its known
behest--an honour constituting the essential idea of liberty, and which
instantly transforms instinctive activity into rational or conscious
action. In a word, Morality (or the definition of what is good), Science
(or the definition of what is true), Art (or the definition of what is
beautiful), were all lacking until the advent of Man. And Man, in his
quality of high priest of a temple, thenceforward dedicated to Goodness,
Beauty, and Truth, was destined to dower and glorify the world by their
bestowal.

What, then, is an artist? What is his function with regard to this
conception of Nature, and, as I may almost say, this investment of her
capital?

Man's sublime function is literally and positively that of a _new
earthly Creator_. His duty is to _make_ all things what they ought to
_become_. Not merely in the matter of the cultivation of the soil of our
earth, but also as regards intellectual and moral culture--justice,
love, science, arts, trade and manufactures--no consummation nor true
conclusion is possible save through Man, to whom creation was confided
that he might _till it_--"ut operatur terram," as the old text of the
Book of Genesis runs. An artist, then, is not simply a sort of
mechanical apparatus which receives or reflects the image of exterior
and visible objects; he is a sensitive and living instrument, which
wakes to consciousness and vibrates at the touch of Nature. And this
vibration it is which at once indicates the artistic vocation, and is
the primary cause of any work of art.

Necessarily called into existence, in the first place, by the fostering
rays of a personal sentiment, a true work of art must reach its perfect
form in the full and impersonal light of reason. Art is concrete and
visible reality, glorified by that other abstract and intelligible
reality which the artist bears within himself, and which is his ideal;
that is to say, the inner revelation, the supreme tribunal, the
ever-growing vision of ultimate possibility after which the whole
fervour of his being strives.

If it were possible for the artist to lay hands on his ideal--to gaze on
it face to face, in all its complete reality--its reproduction would be
reduced to a mere matter of copying. This would amount to downright
realism, superlative of its kind no doubt, but positive; and thus the
two factors of the artist's work--the personal function, which
constitutes its _originality_, and the æsthetic one, which constitutes
its _rationality_--are at once eliminated. This is not the true relation
between the work of art and the artist's ideal conception. The ideal can
never be adequately reproduced. It is the loadstar, the motive force.
The artist feels it, he is ruled by it, it is his undefined "excelsior,"
the imperious _desideratum_ imposed on him by the law of Beauty, and the
very persistence of its inner prompting proves its truth and the
impossibility of its attainment.

To draw from an imperfect and lower reality the elements which shall
measure and determine the extent to which the said reality agrees or
disagrees with Nature's reasonable law, herein lies the artist's highest
function. And this verification of Nature as it is, by Nature's own
laws, is what is known as "Æsthetics." "Æsthetics" are the argument of
_Beauty_.

In art, as elsewhere, reason must counter-balance passion, and thence it
follows that all artistic work of the very highest class leaves an
impress of calm--that sign of real power, which "rules its art even to
the checking point."

As we have already observed, it is the _personal_ emotion, in the
artist's collaboration with Nature, which gives the stamp of
_originality_ to his work. Originality is often confounded with
peculiarity or oddity. Yet they are absolutely distinct qualities.
Oddity is something abnormal, even unhealthy. It is a mitigated form of
mental alienation, and belongs to the region of pathology. As the
synonymous word eccentricity so well denotes, it is a deviation, a
running off at a tangent.

Originality, on the other hand, is the distinctly evident link which
binds the individual to the common intellectual centre. The work of art
is the progeny of the common mother--Nature; and of a distinct
father--the artist. Its originality is simply an asseveration of
paternity. It is the proper name linked to the family appellation, an
individual recommendation approved by the community at large.

But the artist's work does not consist merely in his personal
expression, though that indeed gives it its distinctive quality, its
individual features, even while it thereby confines them within certain
limits.

As a matter of fact, while his artistic sensitiveness brings him into
touch with actual nature, his reason brings him into equal contact with
ideal nature, and this in virtue of that law of transfiguration which
must be applied to all existent realities, so as to draw them ever
closer to those which _are_--in other words, to their perfect prototype.

Let me here quote a sentence which seems to me, at all events, a
somewhat striking formulation, even if it be not a proof, of the truth
of the foregoing remarks. St. Theresa, that pious woman whose brilliant
wisdom has earned her a place amongst the most famous teachers of the
Church, used to say she did not remember ever to have heard a bad
sermon. I ask no better than to believe this, seeing she said it. But it
must be admitted that unless the saint deceived herself, she herself at
least, if not the period in which she lived, must have been blessed with
some special favour, by no means the lightest, in all conscience, which
God has been pleased to bestow upon His faithful servants. However that
may have been, and without desiring to cast the slightest doubt on the
faithfulness of her witness, it may be explained--translated, let us
say; and we may arrive at some comprehension of how, and to what an
occasionally astounding extent, the inaccurate relation of a fact may
co-exist with the absolute veracity of the person who bears the
testimony.

Why did St. Theresa never recollect having heard a bad sermon? Because
every sermon she heard with her outward ears was spontaneously
transfigured, and literally _recreated_ by reason of the sublimity of
that which sounded ever within her own soul. Because the words of the
preacher, void though they might be of literary power or oratorical
artifice, spoke to her of that which she loved best in the world, and
once her spirit was borne in that direction, or to that level, she felt
and heard nothing but God--concerning whom the preacher spoke.

"Use my eyes," said a famous painter, when an acquaintance complained of
the hideousness of his model; "use my eyes, sir, and you will see he is
sublime!"

Thus, at the mere sight of even a second-rate work, so that it suffice
to kindle that divine spark, the hall-mark of genius, in his soul, the
truly great artist will suddenly grasp his idea, and fathom the very
depths of his art in one swift piercing glance.

Who can tell whether the "Barbier de Seville" and "Guillaume Tell" were
not cradled on the paternal trestle stage on which Rossini's musical
training first began?

To pass from exterior tangible realities to emotion, from emotion
onwards to reason, this is the progressive order of true intellectual
development. And this it is which St Augustine sums up so admirably in
one of those clear and perspicuous maxims constantly to be met with in
his works: "Ab exterioribus ad interiora, ab interioribus ad
superiora"--From without, within; from within, above.

Art is one of the three incarnations of the ideal in the real; one of
the three operations of that spirit which is to "renew the face of the
earth;" one of the three revivals of Nature in man; one of the three
forms, in a word, of that principle of separate immortality which
constitutes the perpetual resurrection of humanity at large, by virtue
of its three creative powers, distinct in function, though substantially
identical--viz., Love, the essence of human life; Science, the essence
of truth; and Art, the essence of beauty.

Having thus endeavoured to show how the law which governs the progress
of the human mind resides in the union of the ideal with the real, it
now remains for me to give the counter-proof, by demonstrating the
result of the separation and isolation of these two factors.

In art, mere realism is another word for slavish imitation. Utter
idealism is the madness of fancy. In science, reality, by itself, is the
enigma of fact unenlightened by its laws. Idealism alone is a ghostly
conjecture, devoid of the confirmation of actualities.

In morality, realism unadulterated means the egotism of
self-interest--in other words, a lack of _rational_ sanction in the
field of human will. Unmixed idealism is mere Utopia, or the absence of
the sanction of experience in all that is governed by human maxims.

In each and every case there must be either a soulless body or a
disembodied soul; a denial of the law of existence by one who belongs at
once, by virtue of his double nature, to the tangible and to the
intellectual order of life, and whose being is only normal and complete
inasmuch as it gives expression to these two orders of reality. If there
be one peculiarity specially characteristic of these three high human
vocations, the service of Goodness, of Beauty, and of Truth--if there be
a bond between them, which marks the divinity of their common origin,
and raises them to truly Apostolic dignity--it is that they are
disinterested, gratuitous, _freely given_.

The functions of _life_ are so closely knit to those of _existence_ that
the divine freedom of a man's vocation must perforce submit to the human
necessities of his profession. And the most passionate and eager
_livers_ often understand little, and fare ill, when it comes to matters
of _subsistence_. But all the superior functions of mankind are
necessarily and intrinsically _gratuitous_.

Neither Love, nor Science, nor Art can be venally appraised. They are
the divine three persons of the human conscience. Only finite things can
be sold. Immortal things must bestow themselves freely.

Therefore it is that the handiwork of Goodness, of Beauty, and of Truth
defies the centuries; the very eternity of their first causes gives
them life.

    "NEW HEAVENS AND A NEW EARTH."

Thus did the mighty captive of Patmos, the prince of evangelists,
foretell the end of time, in the twenty-first chapter of the Apocalypse;
a stately vision, culminating in the hosannah of the "New Jerusalem, the
Holy City, coming down from God out of heaven prepared as a bride
adorned for her husband." What mighty seers they were! those great
Hebrew poets! those diviners of the growth and destinies of the human
race!--Job, David, Solomon, the Prophets, St. Paul, and the Apostle
John, who was permitted to learn the secrets of eternity and to peer
into the unfathomable depths of infinite generations!

That New Jerusalem, that chosen country, is _human selection_, the
victorious solver of all enigmas, bearing, like some glorious trophy,
all the sacramental veils the world has dropped one by one along the
centuries--"the faithful steward entering into the joy of his Lord,"
who, under the glorious light of the "New Heaven," lays the "New Earth"
regenerated, _recreated_, according to the law expressed in the supreme
formula: "Verily, I say unto you, Except a man be born again he can in
no case enter into the kingdom of heaven"--at the feet of his Father and
his God.




THE ACADEMY OF FRANCE AT ROME


At a juncture like the present, when, under the mask of so-called
_naturalism_ in Art, an effort is being made to cast disfavour upon that
noble and beneficent institution, the Academy of France in Rome, it
appears to me a duty to enter a protest against the destructive
tendencies, which, could they aspire to the dignity of being called
doctrines, would end in nothing short of the utter obliteration of the
Fine Arts, in their highest sense, and which, moreover, have no
foundation save in the very emptiest and most frivolous of arguments.
The advocates of what _they_ denominate "Modern Art" (as if Art did not
belong to all times) make an unconditional attack on the École de Rome;
and their ultimatum is that the Villa Medicis, being a hotbed of
artistic infection, must be forthwith done away with. This constitutes
the "delenda Carthago" of the Anti-Roman party.

I shall not here undertake to plead _ex professo_ in favour of the
painters, sculptors, architects, and engravers whom the State sends year
by year to Rome, thus ensuring them, in return for the hopes their
talent has excited, constant and assiduous communion with the immortal
teachers of the past, known as "the Masters." Myself a musician, I will
confine myself to the points affecting the interests of musical
composers, the more so as in their case especially a residence in Rome
is looked on as being utterly useless and meaningless. But, seeing the
cause of one art is the cause of Art in general, anything I may say
about musicians will naturally apply to all other artists.

The first thing that strikes me is the fact that this bitterness against
the Roman school is the mere outcome of a desire, more or less frankly
expressed, which sums up in itself the whole of the opposition
programme. "Down with the teachers! Let us use our own wings!" There is
no doubt this is what is meant by "Modern Art."

No more education, then; no more acquired and transmissible ideas. That
means no capital, and therefore no more patrimony nor inheritance. No
past, therefore, no more traditions, no more intellectual paternity. In
other words, the reign of spontaneous generation. For there is nothing
between the two. We must have either teaching or intuitive knowledge.
And note well that those who hug this system are the very men who are
always talking about "the School of the Future." By what right, I ask,
do they invoke the Future, when within a few days they must have become
in its eyes that very Past they will have none of? A wonderfully absurd
self-contradiction, this "kingdom divided against itself!" Show me any
single method of employing human faculties which rests on such a theory!
Law? Physical science? Chemistry? Astronomy? Mechanics? Is not man
primarily an _educated_ being? Does not his whole existence depend on an
amassed capital of knowledge? Is he not taught to read, and write, and
ride, and walk, and use weapons, and play on various instruments? Has
not each department its own special form of gymnastics? And what is a
school, after all, but a gymnasium?

Well, you say, let us grant all that, as far as science is concerned,
and handicraft. But how about genius? No one can learn to be a genius.
You either have that gift or have it not, and it can no more be
bestowed on him who has it not than it can be taken from him who has it.
That is a true and uncontested fact. But it is no less true that, as a
great artist,[20] well qualified to speak, once said, "Art without
science does not exist."

Genius, indeed, is incommunicable, for it is an essentially personal
_gift_. But that which is communicable and transmissible is the language
whereby genius is formulated and expressed, and failing which it must
e'en remain dumb and impotent. Were not Raphael, Mozart, Beethoven, all
men of genius? Did they conceive that fact authorised their scornful
rejection of the traditional masters, who not only initiated them into
the _practice_ of their art, but also pointed them the surest _road_ to
follow, thus saving the immense waste of time involved in seeking a
certainty already assured to them by the experience of past centuries?
This claim to upset historical truths by dint of sheer sophistry is a
downright mockery of common-sense. It amounts to asserting that no
orator nor author need learn his language nor study his syntax and his
dictionary. Théophile Gautier was right when he said, "If I write better
than other people, it is because I have _learnt my business_, and I
have a greater number of words at my command."

But, say the objectors, there are numbers of eminent artists who never
studied at Rome at all.

This is perfectly true, and I hasten to add a fact, on which the
opposition has no particular reason to plume itself so very
proudly--that it by no means necessarily follows that a student at the
École de Rome should emerge from it a very superior artist. But what
does this prove? That Rome cannot perform a miracle and bestow what
Nature has withheld. This is clear as daylight. It really would be too
much to expect genius to be obtained at the price of a journey which
anybody is free to make. But that is not the question at all. The
question really is, whether, granted the possession of an artistic
organisation, the influence Rome exercises thereon is not incontestable
and unrivalled, in the matter of intellectual elevation and artistic
development.

This view leads me to consider the utility of a residence in Rome as
regards musical composers.

We will admit, the opposition say, that painters, sculptors, architects,
and engravers should be sent to Italy. They will there find a
considerable number of masterpieces, deeply interesting at all events,
in connection with the different arts they practise. But what is a
musician to do at Rome? What music is he to listen to? What _artistic_
benefit can he gain there?

The fact is, that the people who make such objections must have given
very little thought to the subject of what an artist is. Do they really
believe he is given over utterly to _technique_, as though mechanical
proficiency constituted his whole art? As if a man might not be a clever
mechanical performer and yet a commonplace artist; a consummate
rhetorician, and a poor writer, or a cold speaker!

What! are eloquence and virtuosity one and the same thing? Is there no
difference betwixt the man and the instrument he uses? Have men
forgotten that the _artisan_ is but part of the _artist_, that is, the
_man_--that it is the _man_ who must be touched, enlightened, carried
away, nay, transfigured, so that he shall be lost in passionate
adoration of that immortal beauty which ensures not momentary success
alone, but the never-ending empire of those masterpieces which have been
the light and guide of human art from the ancients down through the
Renaissance to our own time, and will endure after it, and for ever!

Is this a real or merely a feigned ignorance of those immutable laws of
nutrition and assimilation which govern the growth and perfect
development of every organism? If music is the only thing necessary to
the development and maturity of a musician's talent, I would not only
ask why he should be sent to Rome, since there is no object in his
gazing on the frescoes of Raphael and Michael Angelo on the Vatican
hill, the home of all the oracles? I would fain know why he should read
Homer, Virgil, Tacitus, Juvenal, Dante and Shakespeare, Molière and La
Fontaine, Bossuet and Pascal--all, in a word, of the great nurturers of
formulated human thought? What is the use? Literature is not music....
No! in good truth. But it is Art, which is ancient and modern too. Art,
universal and eternal. And in Art the artist (not the artisan) must find
his food, his health, his power, his very life. After all, what is this
so-called _naturalism_ in Art? I confess I should be glad to be informed
as to the sense attached to the word by those who seem inclined to make
it the banner of a grievance, and the symbol of a claim to a right
denied by despotic routine. Does it mean that Nature should be the
foundation and starting point in all art? In that sense all the Masters
are agreed. But Art cannot stop there, and Raphael, whom I suppose I may
take to have known Nature well, gives us the following definition, as
admirable as it is perhaps over-spontaneous: "Art does not consist in
representing things as Nature _made_ them, but as she _should_ have made
them!" Sublime words, telling us clearly that Art is above all a
preference, a true _selection_, and thus presupposing a training of the
artist's understanding to a special standard of appreciation.

If Nature is everything, and education counts for nothing--if the common
herd knows as much as the Masters, then how comes it that time so
constantly reverses those ephemeral judgments which have so often
showered transports of applause on works soon to be forgotten, or looked
askance on masterpieces which have since been hailed with admiration by
the infallible verdict of posterity?

I freely admit that the general public may be competent to judge a
_play_--and even this may be contested when one remembers what an
immense number of works held our fathers spell-bound, and leave us cold
and indifferent. But even allowing for these ups and downs of
popularity, it cannot be said that Art resides in the drama only. There
is not the faintest analogy between the violent shock caused by some
striking theatrical situation and the calm and noble delight to be
derived from an exquisite and perfect work of art. Nobody could think of
comparing the feelings produced by a melodrama to the emotion roused by
a contemplation of the Frieze of the Parthenon, or the "Dispute du St
Sacrement." A whole abyss lies betwixt the domain of mere sensation and
that of intellectual feeling.

And what shall I say concerning the incalculable benefits to be found in
the quietness and security of such a retreat, far from the feverish roar
and constant anxiety of daily life? What of the silence, which teaches a
man to listen to what is passing within his own soul? What of the deep
solitudes, the distant horizons whose majestic lines seem never to lose
their magic power of raising the mind to the level of the great deeds
they saw performed? What of the Tiber, with its stern waters, eloquent
of the crimes they have engulphed, and the calm of that Roman Campagna
through which they roll?

And Rome herself--alone--the triple city, on whose head the centuries
have set the proud tiara which her Supreme Pontiff wears--shedding the
undying light of Truth, the immortal, over all the earth! What a
standpoint! What a noble diapason we have here! What surroundings for
the man who knows what meditation means!

Let us have no more flaunting of these equivocal and noisy titles,
_naturalism, realism_, and so forth! Art is Nature, yes, _in the first
place_; but Nature verified and registered, weighed--_judged_, in a
word, before the tribunal of a discernment which analyses, and a reason
which rectifies and restores her. Art is a reparation of the failures
and forgetfulness of Reality. It is the immortalisation of mortal things
by a wise process of elimination, not by a blind and servile worship of
their defective and perishable qualities. At all costs and against all
comers, then, let us preserve our splendid École de Rome, whose archives
bear such names as those of David, Ingres, Flandrin, Regnault, Duret,
Hérold, Halévy, Berlioz, Bizet--none of which, as far as I am aware,
warrant the scornful pity under which some people would fain wither a
dynasty already over a century old.

Let us put forth all our strength to defend the sacred retreat which
shelters our growing artist, frees him from premature anxiety concerning
his daily bread, and forewarns and forearms him, not against the
temptation to mere money-getting only, but against the vulgar triumphs
of a paltry and evanescent popularity.




THE ARTIST AND MODERN

SOCIETY


The immense extension of social relations in modern times has had
considerable influence on artistic life and work; an influence which, if
I mistake not, has done more harm than good.

Formerly, and not so very long ago either, an artist, like a man of
learning, was held, and justly so, to be a member of one of the great
corporations of intellectual workers. He was looked on as a sort of
recluse, whose retreat was sacred from disturbance. Men would have
hesitated to tear him from the silence and meditation without which the
conception and production of healthy work which will withstand the
onslaught of Time--that merciless judge who "never spares aught he did
not help to make"--becomes difficult, if not utterly impossible.

Nowadays, the artist is no longer his own master. He belongs to the
world at large. He is worse than its target. He is its prey. His own
personal and productive life is almost entirely absorbed, swamped,
squandered, in so-called social obligations, which gradually stifle him
in that network of sham and barren duties which go to make up many an
existence devoid of serious object or high motive. In a word, society
eats him up.

Now, what is society? It is an aggregation of individuals who are afraid
of being bored, and whose sole idea is to get away from their own
selves, because of the terror with which the idea of being left in their
own sole company inspires them.

Once we begin to tot up the amount of time levied on the artist's
working hours by the constantly increasing number of small calls
struggling and fighting for his attention all day long, we wonder how,
by what extra activity, what effort of concentration, he contrives to
perform his chief duty--that of doing honour to the career he has
chosen, and to which his best powers and his highest faculties by right
belong. It must surely be admitted that in removing the barrier which
its scornful indifference, rather than its intelligent discretion, had
placed between itself and artists in general, modern society has done
them a mischief in no way atoned for by the attractions it offers.

Molière, whose searching glance so deeply fathomed human weaknesses, and
who portrayed them with such an unerring hand, addressed the following
lines, full of the deepest wisdom and the healthiest philosophy, to the
great Colbert:--

    "L'étude et la visite ont leurs talents à part
     Qui se donne à la Cour se dérobé à son art.
     Un esprit partagé rarement s'y consomme
     Et les emplois de feu demandant tout un homme."

Let any one try to realise what can in fairness be expected from the
mind of a man incessantly torn hither and thither by evening parties,
dinners, perpetual invitations to social gatherings of every sort, a
mass of correspondence which leaves him no peace, and the guilty authors
of which never dream of saying to themselves, "I am stealing this man's
time and thoughts, his very life;" and by all the petty tyrannies, in
fine, which go to make up that monster one, called the indiscretion of
the public.

And then the visitors, the crowd of idle and curious loungers, who
assail your privacy from dawn till dark! Somebody says, "That's all your
own fault--you can say you are not at home." Very fine indeed! But how
about those letters of introduction, frequently requesting some service
on your part which you cannot well refuse? You make up your mind to do
your duty, and the visitor is shown in.

"Excuse me; I fear I disturb you!"

"Well, frankly, yes!"

"I beg your pardon; I will not stay now. I'll call another time."

"Oh, pray don't!"

"But--when can I see you without disturbing you?"

"The fact is, I am always busy when I am at home."

"Are you really always so hard at work?"

"Yes, always, unless I am interrupted."

"Oh, I am so sorry to trouble you! But I will only detain you a very few
minutes."

"Well, well, sir, that's long enough to kill a man, not to mention an
idea! But as you are here, pray proceed."

This is a sample of what occurs daily; and I speak here of artists as a
general class. But there is a certain category of artists who have quite
special advantages in this line. I can speak out of my own experience,
for I refer to musicians. A painter or a sculptor can easily protect
his working hours by mercilessly closing his door. He can plead a
sitting model, or, if the worst comes to the worst, he can wield the
brush or chisel even in the presence of visitors. But the musician? His
case is quite different. As his work can be done in daylight, people
take his evenings to provide amusement for their guests; and as he can
work at night, they come and waste and fritter away his days without the
slightest scruple. "And besides," they say, "musical composition is such
an easy thing! It is not a matter of labour; it comes of itself, an
inspiration!"

My readers cannot have any conception of the innumerable and indiscreet
requests to which a musician is daily exposed--the crowds of young
pianists, violinists, vocalists, composers, poets (lyric or otherwise),
teachers and inventors of various methods, systems and theories, editors
of periodicals, pestering you to take their publications; not to mention
the requests for autographs, photographs--the albums and the fans, and
what not, sent for your signature. It all amounts to a perfect
nightmare, and the musician is turned into a sort of national property
to which the public has right of access at any and every hour. To be
brief, our houses are not in the street any more; the street is in our
houses. Our whole life is devoured by idlers, inquisitive folk, loungers
who are bored with themselves, and even by _reporters_ of all sorts, who
force their way into our homes, to inform the public not only as to our
private conversation, but as to the colour of our dressing-gowns and the
cut of our working-jackets!

Well! That is all wrong, and unhealthy. The precious delicacy, the
modesty of feeling, which only lives by quiet contemplation, grows paler
and more wilted, day by day, in that unceasing rout, from which the
artist brings back nought but a superficial, breathless, feverish
activity, tossing convulsively among the ruins of the intellectual
balance he has lost for ever.

Farewell to those hours of calm and luminous peace, wherein alone a man
can see and hear the workings of his own soul! The noble sanctuary of
thought and of emotion, gradually forsaken for the excitements of the
outer world, will soon be nothing but a dark and gloomy dungeon, wherein
the spirit that knows not how to live in silence must die of weariness.

If the hours thus spent were even not spent in vain! If they were only
bestowed on people of some capacity! If they served to cheer none but
truly courageous souls!

But think of the waste of time!--the empty conversations. Think of the
amount of valueless stuff in that ocean of intercourse, which neither
adds nor bestows one tittle of value to the total!

To sum it up, the real plague spot is _the people who are bored,_ and
who must needs kill other men's time, lest their own should kill them by
its weight.

To be bored! To bore one's own self. To try every imaginable dodge to
get away from oneself! Is there any poverty in all the world so pitiful
as this? And what compensation for that which is bestowed on them can be
expected from such a class?

There are certain current opinions, the substance of which people seldom
trouble themselves to verify, and which form the huge patrimony of the
accepted absurdities. One of these is the belief, the self-persuasion,
that the sympathy and protection of the social world are indispensable
to an artist's success.

Truly, those who accept such an illusion, and cling to it, must have
very little experience of the vivifying atmosphere of a profound
artistic conviction.

Social support! It is not uncertain merely; it is the most inconstant,
changeable thing on God's earth. And further, it is only given, as a
rule, to those who no longer need it, just as the courtiers in a certain
famous opera overwhelm a young gentleman, who has just become the
recipient of royal favour, with their offers of service. But now that
material existence takes the first rank in most men's lives, can we
wonder that _seeming_ is taken for _being_, and _skilful management_ for
_talent_? Once the hidden God, the God whose kingdom is within us, is
gone from us, we must have idols. Therefore it is that we see so many
artists troubled about going here and there and everywhere, leaning on
that broken reed of popular advertisement, the fragments of which lie
scattered on the weary path of many an uninspired mind and commonplace
ambition.

One protection alone is worth the artist's pains, and should be sought
by him. His work must be the perfectly sincere expression of his inner
feeling. His artistic production must be the outcome of his personal
life, the faithful enunciation of his thought. Once that is done,
conflicting opinions matter but little to him or it. A work of art can
only shed the amount of warmth which has brought it into being, and
which it never loses. But the artist must have time to kindle his fire
and feed it. Hence a famous composer placed the significant inscription
on his door:--

"Those who come to see me do me honour. Those who stay away do me a
kindness." In other words, "I am never at home to anybody."

Here, again, is another commonplace, equally popular, and in very
frequent use:--

"You'll kill yourself! You work too hard! You really must have some
rest! Do come and see us! It will do you good! It will distract your
thoughts!"

Distract one's thoughts indeed! Why, that's just what I complain
of--what people are much too fond of doing! It's all very well to
distract one's thoughts at a set time chosen by oneself. But to have
one's thoughts distracted for one, at the wrong time, means to
thoroughly confuse them and throw them out of gear.

Work a weariness, an actual danger, forsooth! Those who say so can know
very little about it Labour is neither cruel nor ungrateful. It restores
the strength we give it a hundredfold, and, unlike your financial
operations, the revenue is what brings in the capital.

If there is one incessant worker on the face of God's earth (and He
alone knows how various is its toil), it is the heart in man's body. On
its regular beat depend not only the continuance of our respiration, but
the circulation of our blood, which carries and distributes the
different elements necessary to the working of each organ of our frame
with such unerring discrimination. This splendid organisation works on
incessantly, without a moment's pause, even while we sleep.

Supposing the heart were bidden not to work so hard, to take a little
rest--to amuse itself, in short? Now work, to the intellectual life, is
what the heart is in our physical life. It is the nourishment, the
circulation, the respiration of our intelligence. Like every other sort
of gymnastic, it wearies those, and those only, who are not accustomed
to it. Work has been described as a punishment, a hardship. It is a
healthy and blessed state. Look first at a fertile, well-tilled field,
and then at a strip of fallow land? Is not the balance of happiness and
charm on the side of cultivation and abundant growth?

It is not labour that kills. It is sterility. To be fruitful is to be
young and full of life.

Yet I would not be thought so crotchety, so surly, such a hater of my
kind, as to look on an artist as a sort of solitary. It is undoubtedly
true, and I willingly acknowledge it, that modern society, in enlarging
its borders, has multiplied the artist's opportunities of sharing in
various social phases, and meeting many charming and some very useful
people.

But what, again, is all that worth, if it costs us those hours of
delicious calm--I had almost said of divine hope--when we await (with a
longing less frequently disappointed than some would think) the advent
of a real emotion, or of some deeply touching truth?

What is all the glare of outside show beside the inner light, serene and
glowing, of the beloved Ideal each artist follows without ever wholly
reaching it, but which yet draws us on until we feel it loves us more
even than we love it?

What then must be the suffering inflicted on the unhappy being torn from
a sacred temple and forced into a palace, even were it a thousand times
more dazzling than any in the Arabian Nights?

Every one will remember that famous line from one of our greatest poets:

    "Mon verre n'est pas grand, mais je bois dans mon verre."

There is no necessity that every man's cup should be of the same size.
The great point is, that each should be always full to the brim. A
dwarf, clothed from head to foot in golden raiment, would be just as
happy as a giant in similar case, once granting supreme happiness
consists in being so attired. This is the ingenious comparison by which
St. François de Sales explains how the elect are equal in happiness,
even when they are unequal in glory. So apt is it and so subtle, that it
may well be applied to every degree in life and every form of
perfection.

It is not given to every man to be one of those majestic streams whose
waters carry fertility wherever they pass. But the humblest brooklet, if
it be pure and limpid, mirrors the sky as faithfully as the mightiest
river, or the depths of the ocean itself.

"I will bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her,"
says a Hebrew prophet; and the saintly author of the "Imitation"
assures us that "Thy chamber, if thou continuest therein, groweth
sweet."

"Well, well!" says somebody else, as though by way of compliment, "it
can't be helped. You must pay for being famous!" It is high time the
folly of such remarks as this should be exposed. It is a very doubtful
advantage, in all conscience, for a man to find himself preyed upon
because he is no longer obscure. It cannot be pointed out too often that
the artist's _work_, not his _person_, is public property. And there can
be no powerful, durable, homogeneous production if his work is to be
incessantly mangled and cut up by interruptions. So let society lay to
heart the parting counsel given by Molière to the great Minister I have
already mentioned:--

    "Souffre que, dans leur art, s'avançant chaque jour,
     Par leurs ouvrages seuls ils te fassent la cour!"

The artist who gives himself up too much to social intercourse runs yet
another risk, concerning which it may not be amiss to say a word or two.

By dint of living in the buzz of so many varied opinions, and
admirations, and criticisms, and infatuations for some one or other of
the fashionable art productions of the moment, he gradually comes to
lose confidence in himself, in his own artistic nature, in those
dictates of his personal feeling which at one time led him onward, and
he ends by finding himself in a hopeless maze. The inner voice which
should guide him is lost in the noise of the tempest, and he looks, and
looks in vain, to the caprices of a favour that varies with the fashions
for a support it is incapable of affording him. Some people say that
when you hear a bell strike, you hear only one sound. That depends
entirely on the metal and the founding of the bell. If those be perfect,
the sound produced is a delightful series of harmonic vibrations.

But what could be more hideous than to hear all the bells in the town
strike at once? When, on a thundery day, which makes us feel our breath
oppressed and painful, we say "the air is heavy," we use an
inappropriate word. The air really is too light. What we call weight is
nothing but rarefaction; there is less air than we require to enable us
to breathe freely. The same thing applies to the intellectual
atmosphere. The man of learning, the artist, the poet, and many beside,
each has his own special atmosphere, and must therefore breathe or
choke under his own special conditions. Let us not snatch any one of
them from his own life-giving element, nor stifle him under what Joseph
de Maistre has so well called "the horrible weight of Nothingness."

I know, and I freely confess it, your artist is a being apart, strange,
abnormal, whimsical, freakish--an oddity, in fact. Well, grant it all.
If his peculiarities cause discomfort, he suffers by them too, and much
more, very often, than people think. But, after all, his shortcomings
may be forgiven for the sake of what he is, and it may be that his value
is owing in part to what he lacks. He must be taken as he is, or left
alone. There is no other way to enable him to become all he has it in
him to be.

CH. GOUNOD.


THE END

_Printed by_ BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. _Edinburgh and London_


FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Translator's Note._--The system of scholarships in French public
schools is quite different from that in vogue with us. In the former
country the total value is often split up into fractions and bestowed on
a number of students. I do not think this is ever done in England.

[2] In French public schools the upper classes are not referred to by
numbers. Thus the first or highest class is "Philosophy," the second
"Rhetoric," and so on. (See also _post_, in text.)

[3] See letter from Gounod to Lefuel, dated July 14, 1840.

[4] See letter from Gounod to Lefuel, with a postscript from Hébert
(dated April 4, 1841), with reference to the performance of this Mass.

[5] Jean Murat, a Painter, Grand Prix de Rome.

[6] Confidential servant, who had then been forty years at the Academy.

[7] François Jean Baptiste Guénepin, Architect, Grand Prix de Rome.

[8] See _La Revue_ of June 1, p. 476.

[9] An Architect--Lefuel's "rapin."

[10] Former student at the École Polytechnique, a friend of Gounod,
Hébert, &c.

[11] See letter from Gounod to Lefuel, under date August 21, 1842.

[12] Since writing the above the Abbé Gay has become Bishop of Poitiers
himself.

[13] See letter from Berlioz to Gounod, dated November 19, 1851.

[14] See letter from Gounod to Lefuel, undated.

[15] See letter from Gounod to one of his brothers-in-law, Monsieur
Pigny.

[16] His widowed sister-in-law.

[17] An architect, who had married another daughter of Zimmerman's.

[18] With the exception of the fifth and eighth, which are addressed to
Edouard Dubufe, these letters were written to Monsieur and Madame Pigny.
The reader is doubtless aware that Pigny the architect, Dubufe the
painter, and Gounod, married three daughters of Zimmerman the musical
composer.

[19] "Polyeucte." Gounod also wrote his "Gallia" at this period.

[20] Monsieur Ingres.


etext transcriber's note:

The following changes have been made:

page 5 & 45: Sébastian Bach=>Sebastian Bach

page 17: no proficient=>not proficient

page 82: Goëthe's "Faust"=>Goethe's "Faust"

page 96: I have have=>I have

page 103: Der Freischutz=>Der Freischütz

page 123: Mendelsson=>Mendelssohn

page 157: Medécin=>Médecin

page 182: Je dis que c est=>Je dis que c'est





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