George William Curtis

“ Vive l'opera italienne! Vivent les loges! So Marie Antoinette appeared in the balcony of the banqueting hall at Versailles, and so the garde du roi sprang to its feet with gallant enthusiasm, rattling its sabres and pledging the Queen. It is a heroic story, a romantic tradition.--And the Queen? And the garde du roi?
The authorities of the opera invite the city to an interesting entertainment. Nothing has seemed more natural than the precedence of German opera at a time in which the German musical genius and cultivation are dominant, and in a city in which the German audience abounds. ”

“ There is a certain insight even in gentle youth which does not recoil from the pioneer, and foresees the soft sward springing under the harrow as it tears the heavy clods. Those in whom youth abides never outgrow that precious insight and foresight. One such, not less fair than my Lady Cavaliere, of the most tranquil and undemonstrative behavior, has long been to how many good causes one of the most valuable and efficient friends. She has not cared that Daniel Boone should recede into poetic distance before he seemed to her a hero. ”

“ William Guppy, as lovers will, abandoned himself to blissful dreams of the possible home that should grow out of his lofty passion, it was another vision that he saw; it was the high-born Helen coming down to breakfast in a sweet morning-cap, a neat-handed Phillis. For love, which soars and sings, also builds its nest. The one instinct is as deep and sure as the other. The cynosure of worshipping hearts and eyes is but the romantic aspect of Phillis: and because she is so lofty and so lovely will she be the miracle-worker in the household. ”

“ How many admirable players and singers have come among us! And when, as now, one drops through the bridge of Mirza, a host of Easy Chairs pause for a moment to remember how many there were, and to delight in thinking how many more there will be. Once it was the sailor who crossed the sea to find El Dorado and Cathay, now it is the artist who follows in the fascinating quest. But sailor and artist seeking gold in far countries, like the pollen-powdered bee sucking honey in the flowers, bring as rare a treasure as they find. ”

“ The full volume, the touching sweetness of tone, the exquisite warble, the amazing skill and the marvellous execution, with the perfect ease and repose of consummate art, and the essential womanliness of the whole impression, were indisputable and supreme. To a person sensitive to music and of a certain ardor of temperament there could be no higher pleasure of the kind. Every such person who heard Jenny Lind in her prime, from 1847 to 1852, whether in opera or concert, can recall no greater delight and satisfaction. ”

“ The thorough appreciation of the men whom he described, the sweet and sinewy simplicity of his English, of which he was a twin master with Hawthorne, the constant play of his kindly humor, and manly pathos and sympathy, with his rich voice and massive, magnetic presence, his melodious and refined inflection in speaking, and his quiet, easy, colloquial manner, thrusting thumbs and forefingers in his waistcoat-pockets--all these, pleasing to the mind and sense, made him the pleasantest of lecturers, and still enchant the memory of those
"happy evenings all too swiftly sped." ”

“ A cause is seen through its pioneers, and taste and imagination are confused and confounded in the medium. A nature like Falkland's could not see liberty clearly even through John Pym--how much less through nasal psalm-singing butchers and brewers building a scaffold for the king. So, in our own time, the great question that so sorely rent us was seen by taste and imagination in the form of delicate, highly-cultured women, of a superficial tranquil elegance of society, of patriarchal tradition, of easy knowledge of the world, and the smooth habit of society upon the one hand ”

“ Then with others she plays the great music, concerted Bach or Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, or Wagner, Weber or Mendelssohn; now an old gavotte, now a quaint fantasia, and why not a toccata of Galuppi Baldassero? It is more than a hint or a reminiscence, although it is not an orchestra. But when those fingers kindred with Cecilia's sweep the keys together, the listener wonders whether the hearer of the full orchestra has caught from it the subtle and exquisite significance of the strain which has poured from those enchanted pianos.
The piano is called an inadequate instrument. ”

“ In this loneliness of the hills the young pastor, who was in delicate health and unmarried, relieved the sombre severity of clerical life by teaching a few boys and girls. By that fond indirection he brightened with fresh air and natural music and sunshine the dry routine of his unmated days. For the cheerless solemnity of the life of the country clergy in those times it is hard to imagine. The missionaries to East London tell us that the peculiar characteristic of that vast region, swarming with human beings, is want of entertainment. The people there do not laugh. They have no diversion. ”

“ In the streets of the summer city their palaces are closed, their brilliant equipages are gone; they do not sparkle and murmur in their opera boxes, nor roll stately in slow lines along the trimmed avenues of the Park. But still the celestial life proceeds, a little out of sight, its lovely leisure brimmed with deeds becoming those who have no care but to do good and to transfigure their own fair fortune into a blessing for the world. ”

“ But, on the other hand, it is doubtful whether all that electric eloquence by which the hearer is caught up as by a whirlwind and swept onward at the will of the orator, is not now a tradition in the speeches of the orator. The glow of feeling, the rush of rhetoric, the fiery burst of passionate power--the overwhelming impulse which makes senates adjourn and men spring to arms--were they in the orator or in the fascinated youth of those who remember the sermon in Brattle Street, the apostrophe to Lafayette? ”

“ The pink and blue ribbon, which has replaced the square gold watch-key of other days, fluttered at every button-hole, and with pealing music leading the way, the long, long procession--a Phi Beta Kappa procession such as perhaps Harvard never saw before--wound under the imposing buildings towards the beautiful college hall, the Sanders Theatre.
A great college day is always a feast of memory. As the music swelled and the procession moved, the air was full of visions of forms long vanished, of voices forever silent. ”

“ A nature so modest and simple, and a life so private that it seems almost a wrong to speak of them publicly, yet a character so firm and tranquil and self-possessed that if necessary it would have met without doubt or hesitation any form of martyrdom, can hardly be described without apparent exaggeration. She was born, in our familiar phrase, a lady, and from the beginning, throughout a long life, she was surrounded with perfect ease of circumstance. She was singularly beautiful in her youth, and to the close of her life she had the charm of personal loveliness. ”

“ The charm of that performance was undeniable. The rippling and glittering gayety of Rossini, the sweet and tender melody of Bellini, the sparkle of Auber, the romantic pathos of Donizetti, the brilliant melodramatic strain of Verdi--none who have felt the spell will deny the enchantment. But tempora mutantur; one age with its spirit and taste succeeds another. A deeper, stronger, more earnest taste in music, a higher general cultivation, another theory of opera, have come into the house and seated themselves in the parquet, and look askance at the boxes as the Quartier St. ”

“ In turn, the reformer and the enthusiast behold in her and vaguely comprehend the outward charm of beauty and grace and high condition which they blindly announce. It is as if Daniel Boone, shaggy and savage, suddenly saw his cabin and his rude clearing glorified: a stately, hospitable mansion, overlooking a placid landscape of rounded groves and blooming gardens and distant parks, murmuring with the song of birds and all domestic sounds. Her service to a good cause is more than eloquence, more than devotion--it is the perpetual presence of its ideal. ”

“ If the fairy godmother who presides over the cradle should give the newcomer the choice of gifts, what gift more precious could the young stranger ask than the power of giving a pleasure so pure as that which Cecilia's playing imparts? It is one of her praises that if the choice had been given to her she would instantly have selected the very power which the good fairy bestowed. For in giving the pleasure she does only what she delights to do and would have chosen to do. ”

“ Indeed, if this performance is to be tried by this standard, the play must be regarded as a temperance mission. For temperance is to be inculcated upon the youthful spectators who sit near us not so much by stories and pictures of the furious brute who drives wife and children from a home made desolate by him, and who fly from him as from a demon, as by this simple, faithful showing of the kind-hearted loiterer who makes wretched a wife who yet loves him, and who denounces himself to the child that he loves. ”

“ Jullien, with his monster orchestra, had given monstrous concerts in the monstrous hall of Castle Garden, and many a musician of less fame had come to try his fortune. But we had had neither of the acknowledged masters of the piano, the founders of the modern school of playing--Liszt and Thalberg. Liszt, spoiled and capricious, played very seldom. Chopin, more a composer than a performer, we in America had never supposed would cross the sea: so sensitive, so delicate, so shadowy, his life seemed to exhale, a passionate sigh of music. ”

“ When an orator calls the French Revolution "the greatest, the most un-mixed, the most unstained and wholly perfect blessing Europe has had in modern times, unless, perhaps, we may possibly except the Reformation," there will be those who differ--who will grant the beneficent results of revolutions, as of wild storms of nature, but who will hesitate to call a movement of which the September days, the noyades, and the bloody fury of a brutal mob were incidents, the most unmixed and the most unstained of blessings. ”

“ If taste and imagination shrink from the squalor of the frontier, she remembers the greater squalor and the darker tragedy of the city slum. If the long-haired, shambling, shrill fanatic upon the platform be a contemptuous jest to my Lady Cavaliere, this fairer lady remembers John clad in goat-skins and crying in the wilderness. I wish, she says, that mankind might sit at a sumptuous table, but I shall not scoff at the wooden spoon that feeds its hunger. ”

“ It is a winding sylvan way through woods and by singing streams and solitary farms, and as you drive slowly on you feel yourself penetrating farther and farther into a rural seclusion to which the modern world has hardly found its way, and where you might expect to surprise a peaceful community of ancient New England, as in threading the remoter recesses and heights of the Catskill you might come upon a party of Hendrik Hudson's crew. ”

“ No American would lament the agitation for emancipation, to which the life of the orator has been devoted. It was a great blessing to the country and to humanity; but from the blood of Lovejoy to that of the last victim of the war on either side, it was not an unstained and unmixed blessing. There is, indeed, a sense in which "to gar kings know" that they have a joint in their necks may in itself be called an unstained political gain. ”

“ Meanwhile, if you will contemplate the Fifth Avenue Hotel you will see Corporal Thompson's Broadway Cottage in its present form. But what a busy, brilliant neighborhood it is now! There are shops that recall the prettiest upon the boulevards in Paris; and the people are greatly to be pitied who are too fine to stop and look into them. To be too fine is to lose much. Yet what scion of the golden youth of this moment would dare to walk by the site of Corporal Thompson's Broadway Cottage eating an apple at three o'clock in the afternoon? ”

“ And as for the coarse-toothed harrow--as my Lady Cavaliere sits upon the porch and sees the peacock unfolding his glory upon the soft, thick sward, do you see that my lady wears a delicate trinket around her swan neck, and lo! it is a harrow exquisitely wrought in gold.
The feeling with which she breathed through her beaded veil her dislike of pioneer reformers is as old as human nature. ”