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. Francois 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 Moliere to the great Minister I have
already mentioned:--
"Souffre que, dans leur art, s'avancant 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 Hebert
(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] Francois Jean Baptiste Guenepin, 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 Ecole Polytechnique, a friend of Gounod,
Hebert, &c.
[11] See letter from Gounod to Lefuel, under date August 21, 1842.
[12] Since writing the above the Abbe 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: Sebastian Bach=>Sebastian Bach
page 17: no proficient=>not proficient
page 82: Goethe's "Faust"=>Goethe's "Faust"
page 96: I have have=>I have
page 103: Der Freischutz=>Der Freischuetz
page 123: Mendelsson=>Mendelssohn
page 157: Medecin=>Medecin
page 182: Je dis que c est=>Je dis que c'est