I have now come to the grand drama of my life; but I shall not relate
all its painful details. It is enough to say that an English company
came over to perform Shakespeare's plays, then entirely unknown in
France, at the Odéon. I was present at the first performance of
'Hamlet,' and there, in the part of Ophelia, I saw Miss Smithson, whom I
married five years afterward. I can only compare the effect produced by
her wonderful talent, or rather her dramatic genius, on my imagination
and heart, with the convulsion produced on my mind by the work of the
great poet whom she interpreted. It is impossible to say more.
This sudden and unexpected revelation of Shakespeare overwhelmed me. The
lightning-flash of his genius revealed the whole heaven of art to me,
illuminating its remotest depths in a single flash. I recognized the
meaning of real grandeur, real beauty, and real dramatic truth; and I
also realized the utter absurdity of the ideas circulated by Voltaire in
France about Shakespeare, and the pitiful pettiness of our old poetic
school, the offspring of pedagogues and _frères ignorantins_.
But the shock was too great, and it was a long while before I recovered
from it. I became possessed by an intense, overpowering sense of
sadness, that in my then sickly, nervous state produced a mental
condition adequately to describe which would take a great physiologist.
I could not sleep, I lost my spirits, my favorite studies became
distasteful to me, and I spent my time wandering aimlessly about Paris
and its environs. During that long period of suffering, I can only
recall four occasions on which I slept, and then it was the heavy,
death-like sleep produced by complete physical exhaustion. These were
one night when I had thrown myself down on some sheaves in a field near
Ville-Juif; one day in a meadow in the neighborhood of Sceaux; once on
the snow on the banks of the frozen Seine, near Neuilly; and lastly, on
a table in the Café du Cardinal at the corner of the Boulevard des
Italiens and the Rue Richelieu, where I slept for five hours, to the
terror of the _garçons_, who thought I was dead and were afraid to
come near me.
It was on my return from one of these wanderings, in which I must have
seemed like one seeking his soul, that my eyes fell on Moore's 'Irish
Melodies,' lying open on my table at the song beginning "When he who
adores thee." I seized my pen, and then and there wrote the music to
that heart-rending farewell, which is published at the end of my
collection of songs, 'Irlande,' under the title of 'Elégie.' This is the
only occasion on which I have been able to vent any strong feeling in
music while still under its influence. And I think that I have rarely
reached such intense truth of musical expression, combined with so much
realistic power of harmony.