Minister, lecturer, singer, no one has any right to ask of his audience anything more than opportunity,--the externals of attention. All the rest is his own look-out. If you prepossess your mind with a theme, you do not give him an even chance. You must offer him in the beginning a tabula rasa,--a fair field, and then it is his business to go in and win your attention; and if he cannot, let him pay the costs, for the fault is his own.
This also is torture, but its name is Zoar, a little one.
There is yet another way. You may go with one or many who believe in individuality. They go to the concert for love of music,--negatively for its rest and refreshment, positively for its embodied delights. They take you for your enjoyment, which they permit you to compass after your own fashion. They force from you no comment. They demand no criticism. They do not require censure as your certificate of taste. They do not trouble themselves with your demeanor. If you choose to talk in the pauses, they are receptive and cordial. If you choose to be silent, it is just as well. If you go to sleep, they will not mind,--unless, under the spell of the genius of the place, your sleep becomes vocal, and you involuntarily join the concert in the undesirable role of De Trop. If you go into raptures, it is all the same; you are not watched and made a note of. They leave you at the top of your bent. Whether you shall be amused, delighted, or disgusted, they respect your decisions and allow you to remain free.
How did I go to my concert? Can I tell for the eyes that made "a sunshine in the shady place"? Was I not veiled with the beautiful hair, and blinded with the lily's white splendor?
So went I with the Fairy Queen in her golden coach drawn by six white mice, and, behold, I was in Camilla's concert-room.
It is to be a fiddle affair. Now I am free to say, if there is anything I hate, it is a fiddle. Hide it away under as many Italian coatings as you choose, viol, violin, viola, violone, violoncello, violncellettissimo, at bottom it is all one, a fiddle; in its best estate, a whirligig, without dignity, sentiment, or power; and at worst a rubbing, rasping, squeaking, woollen, noisy nuisance that it sets teeth on edge to think of. I shudder at the mere memory of the reluctant bow dragging its slow length across the whining strings. And here I am, in my sober senses, come to hear a fiddle!
But it is Camilla's. Do you remember a little girl who, a few years ago, became famous for her wonderful performance on the violin? At six years of age she went to a great concert, and of all the fine instruments there, the unseen spirit within her made choice, "Papa, I should like to learn the violin." So she learned it and loved it, and when ten years old delighted foreign and American audiences with her marvelous genius. It was the little Camilla who now, after ten years of silence, tuned her beloved instrument once more.
As she walks softly and quietly in, I am conscious of a disappointment. I had unwittingly framed for her an aesthetic violin, with the essential strings and bridge and bow indeed, but submerged and forgot in such Orient splendors as befit her glorious genius. Barbaric pearl and gold, finest carved work, flashing gems from Indian watercourses, the delicatest pink sea-shell, a bubble-prism caught and crystallized,--of all rare and curious substances wrought with dainty device, fantastic as a dream, and resplendent as the light, should her instrument be fashioned. Only in "something rich and strange" should the mystic soul lie sleeping for whom her lips shall break the spell of slumber, and her young fingers unbar the sacred gates.
And, oh me! it is, after all, the very same old red fiddle!
Dee, dee!
But she neither glides nor trips nor treads, as heroines invariably do, but walks in like a Christian woman. She steps upon the stage and faces the audience that gives her hearty greeting and waits the prelude. There is time for cool survey.
I am angry still about the red fiddle, and I look scrutinizingly at her dress, and think how ugly is the mode.
The skirt is white silk,--a brocade, I believe,--at any rate, stiff, and, though probably full to overflowing in the hands of the seamstress, who must compress it within prescribed limits about the waist, looks scanty and straight. Why should she not, she who comes before us tonight, not as a fashion, but an inspiration,--why should she not assume that immortal classic drapery whose graceful falls and folds the sculptor vainly tries to imitate, the painter vainly seeks to limn?
When Corinne tuned her lyre at the Capitol, when she knelt to be crowned with her laurel crown at the hands of a Roman senator, is it possible to conceive her swollen out with crinoline? And yet I remember, that, though sa roe etait blanche, et son costume etait tres pittoresque, it was sans s'e carter cependant assez des usages recus pour que l'on put y trouver de l'affectation; and I suppose, if one should now suddenly collapse from conventional rotundity to antique statuesqueness, the great "on" would very readily "y trouver de l'affectation." Nevertheless, though one must dress in Rome as Romans do, and though the Roman way of dressing is, taking all things into the account, as good as any, and if not more graceful, a thousand times more convenient, wholesome, comfortable, and manageable that Helen's, still it does seem that, when one steps out of the ordinary area of Roman life and assumes an abnormal position, one might, without violence, assume temporarily an abnormal dress, and refresh our dilated eyes once more with flowing, wavy outlines. Music is one of the eternities: why should not its accessories be? Why should a discord disturb the eye, when only concords delight the ear?
