  The ear has its ecstasy as have other senses. As there is love without dominion, so there is dominion without love. When Fame stands by us all alone, she is an angel clad in light and strength; but when Love touches her she drops her sword, and fades away, ghostlike and ashamed. Society only thought her—unamiable. True, she never said an unkind thing, or did one; she never hurt man or woman; she was generous to a fault; and to aid even people she despised would give herself trouble unending. But these are serious, simple qualities which do not show much, and are soon forgotten by those who benefit from them. Had she laughed more, danced more, taken more kindly to the fools and their follies, she might have been acid of tongue and niggard of sympathy; the world would have thought her much more amiable. "If she would only listen to me!" thought her mother, in the superior wisdom of her popular little life. "If she would only kiss a few women in the morning, and flirt with a few men in the evening, it would set her all right with them in a month. It is no use doing good to anybody; they only hate you for it. You have seen them in their straits; it is like seeing them without their wig or their teeth; they never forgive it. But to be pleasant, always to be pleasant, that is the thing. And after all it costs nothing." Marriage, as our world sees it, is simply a convenience; a somewhat clumsy contrivance to tide over a social difficulty. A sin! did the world know of such a thing? Hardly. Now and then, for sake of its traditions, the world took some hapless boy, or some still yet unhappier woman, and pilloried one of them, and drove them out under a shower of stones, selecting them by caprice, persecuting them without justice, slaying them because they were friendless. But that was all. For the most part sin was an obsolete thing, archaic and unheard of. Music is not a science, any more than poetry is. It is a sublime instinct, like genius of all kinds. Charity in various guises is an intruder the poor see often; but courtesy and delicacy are visitors with which they are seldom honoured. There is no shame more bitter to endure than to despise oneself. It is harder to keep true to high laws and pure instincts in modern society than it was in the days of martyrdom. One weeps for the death of children, but perhaps the change of them into callous men and women is a sadder change to see after all. Honour is an old-world thing, but it smells sweet to those in whose hand it is strong. Young lives are tossed upon the stream of life like rose-leaves on a fast-running river, and the rose-leaves are blamed if the river be too strong and too swift for them and they perish. It is the fault of the rose-leaves. Every pretty woman should be a flirt, every clever woman a politician; the aim, the animus, the intrigue, the rivalry which accompany each of these pursuits make the salt without which the great dinner were tasteless. In these old Austrian towns the churches are always very reverent places; dark and tranquil; overladen, indeed, with ornament and image, but too full of shadow for these to much offend; there is the scent of centuries of incense; the walls are yellow with the damp of ages. Mountain suzerains and bold reiters, whose deeds are The moths will eat all that fine delicate feeling away, little by little; the moths of the world will eat the unselfishness first, and then the innocence, and then the honesty, and then the decency; no one will see them eating, no one will see the havoc being wrought, but little by little the fine fabric will go, and in its place will be dust. Ah, the pity of it! The pity of it! The webs come out of the great weaver's loom lovely enough, but the moths of the world eat them all. She had five hundred dear friends, but this one she was really fond of; that is to say, she never said anything bad of her, and only laughed at her good-naturedly when she had left a room; and this abstinence is as strong a mark of sincerity now-a-days as dying for another used to be in the old days of strong feeling and the foolish expression of them. Gratitude is such an unpleasant quality, you know; there is always a grudge behind it! The richest soil always bears the rankest mushrooms: France is always bearing mushrooms. Position, she thought, was the only thing that, like old wine or oak furniture, improved with years. Position is a pillory: sometimes they pelt one with rose-leaves, and sometimes with rotten eggs, but one is for ever in the pillory! We are too afraid of death: that fear is the shame of Christianity. He never could prevail on his vanity to break with her, lest men should think she had broken with him. She would go grandly to the guillotine, but she will never understand her own times. She has dignity; we have not a scrap; we have forgotten what it was like; we go into a passion at the amount of our bills; we play and never pay; we smoke and we wrangle; we laugh loud, much too loud; we inspire nothing unless, now and then, a bad war or a disastrous speculation; we live showily, noisily, meanly, gaudily. Big brains do not easily hold trifles ... little packets of starch that this world thinks are the staff of life. Pehl, like a young girl, is prettiest in the morning. Pehl is calm and sedate, and simple and decorous. Pehl is like some tender, fair, wholesome yet patrician beauty, like the pretty aristocratic Charlotte in Kaulbach's picture, who cuts the bread-and-butter, yet looks a patrician. Pehl has nothing of the belle petite, like her sister of Baden; nothing of the titled cocadetta, like her cousin of Monaco; Pehl does not gamble or riot or conduct herself madly in any way; she is a little old-fashioned still in a courtly way; she has a little rusticity still in her elegant manners; she is like the noble dames of the past ages, who were so high of rank and so proud of habit, yet were not above the distilling-room and the spinning-wheel; who were quiet, serious, sweet, and smelt of the rose-leaves with which they filled their big jars. The pity of modern Society is that all its habits make as effectual a disguise morally as our domino in carnival does physically. Everybody looks just like everybody else. Perhaps, as under the domino, so under the appearance, there may be great nobility or great deformity; but all look alike. Were Socrates amongst us, he would only look like a club bore; and were there Messalina, she would only look—well—look much like our Duchesse Jeunne! She did not know that from these swamps of flattery, intrigue, envy, rivalry, and emulation there rises a miasma which scarcely the healthiest lungs can withstand. She did not know that though many may be indifferent to the tempting of men, few indeed are impenetrable to the smile and the sneer of women; that to live your own life in the midst of the world is a harder The world has grown apathetic and purblind. Critics rage and quarrel before a canvas, but the nations do not care; quarries of marble are hewn into various shapes, and the throngs gape before them and are indifferent; writers are so many that their writings blend in the public mind in a confused phantasmagoria, where the colours run into one another, and the lines are all waved and indistinct; the singer alone still keeps the old magic power, "The beauty that was Athens, once the glory that was Rome's," still holds the divine Cadmus, still sways the vast thronged auditorium, till the myriads hold their breath like little children in delight and awe. The great singer alone has the magic sway of fame; and if he close his lips, "The gaiety of nations is eclipsed," and the world seems empty and silent, like a wood in which the birds are all dead. |
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