Works of Honore De Balzac

by Honoré de Balzac

  “The secret of this music and its refreshing effect on the soul is, I believe, that of a very few works of human genius: it carries us for the moment into the infinite; we feel it within us; we see it, in those melodies as boundless as the hymns sung round the throne of God. Rossini’s genius carries us up to prodigious heights, whence we look down on a promised land, and our eyes, charmed by heavenly light, gaze into limitless space. Elcia’s last strain, having almost recovered from her grief, brings a feeling of earth-born passions into this hymn of thanksgiving. This, again, is a touch of genius.

  “Ay, sing!” exclaimed the Duchess, as she listened to the last stanza with the same gloomy enthusiasm as the singers threw into it. “Sing! You are free!”

  The words were spoken in a voice that startled the physician. To divert Massimilla from her bitter reflections, while the excitement of recalling la Tinti was at its height, he engaged her in one of the arguments in which the French excel.

  “Madame,” said he, “in explaining this grand work — which I shall come to hear again to-morrow with a fuller comprehension, thanks to you, of its structure and its effect — you have frequently spoken of the color of the music, and of the ideas it depicts; now I, as an analyst, a materialist, must confess that I have always rebelled against the affectation of certain enthusiasts, who try to make us believe that music paints with tones. Would it not be the same thing if Raphael’s admirers spoke of his singing with colors?”

  “In the language of musicians,” replied the Duchess, “painting is arousing certain associations in our souls, or certain images in our brain; and these memories and images have a color of their own; they are sad or cheerful. You are battling for a word, that is all. According to Capraja, each instrument has its task, its mission, and appeals to certain feelings in our souls. Does a pattern in gold on a blue ground produce the same sensations in you as a red pattern on black or green? In these, as in music, there are no figures, no expression of feeling; they are purely artistic, and yet no one looks at them with indifference. Has not the oboe the peculiar tone that we associate with the open country, in common with most wind instruments? The brass suggests martial ideas, and rouses us to vehement or even somewhat furious feelings. The strings, for which the material is derived from the organic world, seem to appeal to the subtlest fibres of our nature; they go to the very depths of the heart. When I spoke of the gloomy hue, and the coldness of the tones in the introduction to Mose, was I not fully as much justified as your critics are when they speak of the ‘color’ in a writer’s language? Do you not acknowledge that there is a nervous style, a pallid style, a lively, and a highly-colored style? Art can paint with words, sounds, colors, lines, form; the means are many; the result is one.

  “An Italian architect might give us the same sensation that is produced in us by the introduction to Mose, by constructing a walk through dark, damp avenues of tall, thick trees, and bringing us out suddenly in a valley full of streams, flowers, and mills, and basking in the sunshine. In their greatest moments the arts are but the expression of the grand scenes of nature.

  “I am not learned enough to enlarge on the philosophy of music; go and talk to Capraja; you will be amazed at what he can tell you. He will say that every instrument that depends on the touch or breath of man for its expression and length of note, is superior as a vehicle of expression to color, which remains fixed, or speech, which has its limits. The language of music is infinite; it includes everything; it can express all things.

  “Now do you see wherein lies the pre-eminence of the work you have just heard? I can explain it in a few words. There are two kinds of music: one, petty, poor, second-rate, always the same, based on a hundred or so of phrases which every musician has at his command, a more or less agreeable form of babble which most composers live in. We listen to their strains, their would-be melodies, with more or less satisfaction, but absolutely nothing is left in our mind; by the end of the century they are forgotten. But the nations, from the beginning of time till our own day, have cherished as a precious treasure certain strains which epitomize their instincts and habits; I might almost say their history. Listen to one of these primitive tones, — the Gregorian chant, for instance, is, in sacred song, the inheritance of the earliest peoples, — and you will lose yourself in deep dreaming. Strange and immense conceptions will unfold within you, in spite of the extreme simplicity of these rudimentary relics. And once or twice in a century — not oftener, there arises a Homer of music, to whom God grants the gift of being ahead of his age; men who can compact melodies full of accomplished facts, pregnant with mighty poetry. Think of this; remember it. The thought, repeated by you, will prove fruitful; it is melody, not harmony, that can survive the shocks of time.

  “The music of this oratorio contains a whole world of great and sacred things. A work which begins with that introduction and ends with that prayer is immortal — as immortal as the Easter hymn, O filii et filioe, as the Dies iroe of the dead, as all the songs which in every land have outlived its splendor, its happiness, and its ruined prosperity.”

  The tears the Duchess wiped away as she quitted her box showed plainly that she was thinking of the Venice that is no more; and Vendramin kissed her hand.

  The performance ended with the most extraordinary chaos of noises: abuse and hisses hurled at Genovese and a fit of frenzy in praise of la Tinti. It was a long time since the Venetians had had so lively an evening. They were warmed and revived by that antagonism which is never lacking in Italy, where the smallest towns always throve on the antagonistic interests of two factions: the Geulphs and Ghibellines everywhere; the Capulets and the Montagues at Verona; the Geremei and the Lomelli at Bologna; the Fieschi and the Doria at Genoa; the patricians and the populace, the Senate and tribunes of the Roman republic; the Pazzi and the Medici at Florence; the Sforza and the Visconti at Milan; the Orsini and the Colonna at Rome, — in short, everywhere and on every occasion there has been the same impulse.

  Out in the streets there were already Genovists and Tintists.

  The Prince escorted the Duchess, more depressed than ever by the loves of Osiride; she feared some similar disaster to her own, and could only cling to Emilio, as if to keep him next her heart.

  “Remember your promise,” said Vendramin. “I will wait for you in the square.”

  Vendramin took the Frenchman’s arm, proposing that they should walk together on the Piazza San Marco while awaiting the Prince.

  “I shall be only too glad if he should not come,” he added.

  This was the text for a conversation between the two, Vendramin regarding it as a favorable opportunity for consulting the physician, and telling him the singular position Emilio had placed himself in.

  The Frenchman did as every Frenchman does on all occasions: he laughed. Vendramin, who took the matter very seriously, was angry; but he was mollified when the disciple of Majendie, of Cuvier, of Dupuytren, and of Brossais assured him that he believed he could cure the Prince of his high-flown raptures, and dispel the heavenly poetry in which he shrouded Massimilla as in a cloud.

  “A happy form of misfortune!” said he. “The ancients, who were not such fools as might be inferred from their crystal heaven and their ideas on physics, symbolized in the fable of Ixion the power which nullifies the body and makes the spirit lord of all.”

  Vendramin and the doctor presently met Genovese, and with him the fantastic Capraja. The melomaniac was anxious to learn the real cause of the tenor’s fiasco. Genovese, the question being put to him, talked fast, like all men who can intoxicate themselves by the ebullition of ideas suggested to them by a passion.

  “Yes, signori, I love her, I worship her with a frenzy of which I never believed myself capable, now that I am tired of women. Women play the mischief with art. Pleasure and work cannot be carried on together. Clara fancies that I was jealous of her success, that I wanted to hinder her triumph at Venice; but I was clapping in the side-scenes, and shouted Diva louder than any one in the house.”<
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  “But even that,” said Cataneo, joining them, “does not explain why, from being a divine singer, you should have become one of the most execrable performers who ever piped air through his larynx, giving none of the charm even which enchants and bewitches us.”

  “I!” said the singer. “I a bad singer! I who am the equal of the greatest performers!”

  By this time, the doctor and Vendramin, Capraja, Cataneo, and Genovese had made their way to the piazzetta. It was midnight. The glittering bay, outlined by the churches of San Giorgio and San Paulo at the end of the Giudecca, and the beginning of the Grand Canal, that opens so mysteriously under the Dogana and the church of Santa Maria della Salute, lay glorious and still. The moon shone on the barques along the Riva de’ Schiavoni. The waters of Venice, where there is no tide, looked as if they were alive, dancing with a myriad spangles. Never had a singer a more splendid stage.

  Genovese, with an emphatic flourish, seemed to call Heaven and Earth to witness; and then, with no accompaniment but the lapping waves, he sang Ombra adorata, Crescentini’s great air. The song, rising up between the statues of San Teodoro and San Giorgio, in the heart of sleeping Venice lighted by the moon, the words, in such strange harmony with the scene, and the melancholy passion of the singer, held the Italians and the Frenchman spellbound.

  At the very first notes, Vendramin’s face was wet with tears. Capraja stood as motionless as one of the statues in the ducal palace. Cataneo seemed moved to some feeling. The Frenchman, taken by surprise, was meditative, like a man of science in the presence of a phenomenon that upsets all his fundamental axioms. These four minds, all so different, whose hopes were so small, who believed in nothing for themselves or after themselves, who regarded their own existence as that of a transient and a fortuitous being, — like the little life of a plant or a beetle, — had a glimpse of Heaven. Never did music more truly merit the epithet divine. The consoling notes, as they were poured out, enveloped their souls in soft and soothing airs. On these vapors, almost visible, as it seemed to the listeners, like the marble shapes about them in the silver moonlight, angels sat whose wings, devoutly waving, expressed adoration and love. The simple, artless melody penetrated to the soul as with a beam of light. It was a holy passion!

  But the singer’s vanity roused them from their emotion with a terrible shock.

  “Now, am I a bad singer?” he exclaimed, as he ended.

  His audience only regretted that the instrument was not a thing of Heaven. This angelic song was then no more than the outcome of a man’s offended vanity! The singer felt nothing, thought nothing, of the pious sentiments and divine images he could create in others, — no more, in fact, than Paganini’s violin knows what the player makes it utter. What they had seen in fancy was Venice lifting its shroud and singing — and it was merely the result of a tenor’s fiasco!

  “Can you guess the meaning of such a phenomenon?” the Frenchman asked of Capraja, wishing to make him talk, as the Duchess had spoken of him as a profound thinker.

  “What phenomenon?” said Capraja.

  “Genovese — who is admirable in the absence of la Tinti, and when he sings with her is a braying ass.”

  “He obeys an occult law of which one of your chemists might perhaps give you the mathematical formula, and which the next century will no doubt express in a statement full of x, a, and b, mixed up with little algebraic signs, bars, and quirks that give me the colic; for the finest conceptions of mathematics do not add much to the sum total of our enjoyment.

  “When an artist is so unfortunate as to be full of the passion he wishes to express, he cannot depict it because he is the thing itself instead of its image. Art is the work of the brain, not of the heart. When you are possessed by a subject you are a slave, not a master; you are like a king besieged by his people. Too keen a feeling, at the moment when you want to represent that feeling, causes an insurrection of the senses against the governing faculty.”

  “Might we not convince ourselves of this by some further experiment?” said the doctor.

  “Cataneo, you might bring your tenor and the prima donna together again,” said Capraja to his friend.

  “Well, gentlemen,” said the Duke, “come to sup with me. We ought to reconcile the tenor and la Clarina; otherwise the season will be ruined in Venice.”

  The invitation was accepted.

  “Gondoliers!” called Cataneo.

  “One minute,” said Vendramin. “Memmi is waiting for me at Florian’s; I cannot leave him to himself. We must make him tipsy to-night, or he will kill himself to-morrow.”

  “Corpo santo!” exclaimed the Duke. “I must keep that young fellow alive, for the happiness and future prospects of my race. I will invite him, too.”

  They all went back to Florian’s, where the assembled crowd were holding an eager and stormy discussion to which the tenor’s arrival put an end. In one corner, near a window looking out on the colonnade, gloomy, with a fixed gaze and rigid attitude, Emilio was a dismal image of despair.

  “That crazy fellow,” said the physician, in French, to Vendramin, “does not know what he wants. Here is a man who can make of a Massimilla Doni a being apart from the rest of creation, possessing her in heaven, amid ideal splendor such as no power on earth can make real. He can behold his mistress for ever sublime and pure, can always hear within him what we have just heard on the seashore; can always live in the light of a pair of eyes which create for him the warm and golden glow that surrounds the Virgin in Titian’s Assumption, — after Raphael had invented it or had it revealed to him for the Transfiguration, — and this man only longs to smirch the poem.

  “By my advice he must needs combine his sensual joys and his heavenly adoration in one woman. In short, like all the rest of us, he will have a mistress. He had a divinity, and the wretched creature insists on her being a female! I assure you, monsieur, he is resigning heaven. I will not answer for it that he may not ultimately die of despair.

  “O ye women’s faces, delicately outlined in a pure and radiant oval, reminding us of those creations of art where it has most successfully competed with nature! Divine feet that cannot walk, slender forms that an earthly breeze would break, shapes too frail ever to conceive, virgins that we dreamed of as we grew out of childhood, admired in secret, and adored without hope, veiled in the beams of some unwearying desire, — maids whom we may never see again, but whose smile remains supreme in our life, what hog of Epicurus could insist on dragging you down to the mire of this earth!

  “The sun, monsieur, gives light and heat to the world, only because it is at a distance of thirty-three millions of leagues. Get nearer to it, and science warns you that it is not really hot or luminous, — for science is of some use,” he added, looking at Capraja.

  “Not so bad for a Frenchman and a doctor,” said Capraja, patting the foreigner on the shoulder. “You have in those words explained the thing which Europeans least understand in all Dante: his Beatrice. Yes, Beatrice, that ideal figure, the queen of the poet’s fancies, chosen above all the elect, consecrated with tears, deified by memory, and for ever young in the presence of ineffectual desire!”

  “Prince,” said the Duke to Emilio, “come and sup with me. You cannot refuse the poor Neapolitan whom you have robbed both of his wife and of his mistress.”

  This broad Neapolitan jest, spoken with an aristocratic good manner, made Emilio smile; he allowed the Duke to take his arm and lead him away.

  Cataneo had already sent a messenger to his house from the cafe.

  As the Palazzo Memmi was on the Grand Canal, not far from Santa Maria della Salute, the way thither on foot was round by the Rialto, or it could be reached in a gondola. The four guests would not separate and preferred to walk; the Duke’s infirmities obliged him to get into his gondola.

  At about two in the morning anybody passing the Memmi palace would have seen light pouring out of every window across the Grand Canal, and have heard the delightful overture to Semiramide performed at the
foot of the steps by the orchestra of the Fenice, as a serenade to la Tinti.

  The company were at supper in the second floor gallery. From the balcony la Tinti in return sang Almavida’s Buona sera from Il Barbiere, while the Duke’s steward distributed payment from his master to the poor artists and bid them to dinner the next day, such civilities as are expected of grand signors who protect singers, and of fine ladies who protect tenors and basses. In these cases there is nothing for it but to marry all the corps de theatre.

  Cataneo did things handsomely; he was the manager’s banker, and this season was costing him two thousand crowns.

  He had had all the palace furnished, had imported a French cook, and wines of all lands. So the supper was a regal entertainment.

  The Prince, seated next la Tinti, was keenly alive, all through the meal, to what poets in every language call the darts of love. The transcendental vision of Massimilla was eclipsed, just as the idea of God is sometimes hidden by clouds of doubt in the consciousness of solitary thinkers. Clarina thought herself the happiest woman in the world as she perceived Emilio was in love with her. Confident of retaining him, her joy was reflected in her features, her beauty was so dazzling that the men, as they lifted their glasses, could not resist bowing to her with instinctive admiration.

  “The Duchess is not to compare with la Tinti,” said the Frenchman, forgetting his theory under the fire of the Sicilian’s eyes.

  The tenor ate and drank languidly; he seemed to care only to identify himself with the prima donna’s life, and had lost the hearty sense of enjoyment which is characteristic of Italian men singers.

  “Come, signorina,” said the Duke, with an imploring glance at Clarina, “and you, caro prima uomo,” he added to Genovese, “unite your voices in one perfect sound. Let us have the C of Qual portento, when light appears in the oratorio we have just heard, to convince my old friend Capraja of the superiority of unison to any embellishment.”