The opera played at San Carlo that night was La Traviata. Nancy, not oppressed by the sound and sight of a contralto singing and acting far better than she could ever hope to sing and act, thoroughly enjoyed it. The Violetta was a delicate and lovely creature so that, even if her coloratura did lack something of the finest quality and ease, her death was almost intolerably moving. Alfredo was played by an elderly tenor into whose voice the vibrato of age had already insinuated itself. He was, however, such a master of all the graces that neither his appearance nor the fading of his voice seemed to matter a great deal. In compensation for an elderly tenor, the heavy father was played by a very young barytone with a voice of glorious roundness and sonority. Kenrick was much excited by this performance and prophesied for this new singer a success all over Europe as round and sonorous as his voice. He declared that he had never heard Germont’s great aria “Di Provenza” given so well.
After the performance they went to supper at one of the popular restaurants near the opera house, where Kenrick discoursed upon the æsthetic value of La Traviata.
“It’s the fashion to decry it as a piece of tawdry and melodramatic sensationalism, but to my mind it fulfills perfectly Aristotle’s catharsis.”
“That sounds reassuring,” Nancy laughed. “But I’m afraid I don’t in the least understand what it means.”
“Aristotle found an æsthetic value in the purging of the emotions. Well, at the end of Traviata we are left with the feeling that music could not express more completely the particular set of emotions that are stirred by the story of Alfredo, Violetta, and Germont. No critic has ever done justice to the younger Dumas’s Dame aux Camélias either as a novel or as a play. Yet both they and the opera founded upon them have a perennial vitality so marked as almost to tempt me to claim for them an eternal vitality. The actuality of Traviata is so tremendous that on the first night of its production in Venice it was a failure because the soprano playing Violetta was so fat as to revolt the audience’s sense of fact. This seems to me highly significant. You cannot imagine an operatic version of, let us say, Wuthering Heights being hissed off the stage because the Heathcliff revolted any audience’s sense of fact. Now Wuthering Heights much more nearly approximates to melodrama than La Dame aux Camélias. The pretentious spiritualism with which a sordid tale of cruelty, revenge, and lust is decked out cannot hide from the sane observer the foolish parody of human nature presented therein. It has been acclaimed as a work of tragic grandeur and sublime imagination as if forsooth grandeur of imagination were to be measured by the remoteness of protagonists or plot from recognisable life. Let us grant that Traviata exhibits a low form of life——”
“Or a form of low life,” Nancy interposed.
“No, no, don’t make a joke of it! I feel seriously and strongly on this subject,” Kenrick averred. “But a live jelly-fish is a great deal more marvellous and much more beautiful than a stuffed lion. Nothing really matters in a work of art if it lacks vitality. I would not say that Wuthering Heights lacked all vitality, but its vitality is slight, indeed it is almost imperceptible except to the precious and microscopic taste of the literary connoisseur. The vitality of La Dame aux Camélias is startling, so startling indeed as to repel the fastidious and academic mind just as a don would be embarrassed were his attentions solicited by a gay lady outside the St. James’s Restaurant. The trouble is that the standards of criticism are nearly always set up by the middle-aged. La Dame aux Camélias is a book for youth. We have most of us lived not wisely and not well in our youth, and middle-age is not the time to judge that early behaviour. Let it be remembered that the follies of our youth are usually repeated when we are old—not always actually, but certainly in imagination. An old man should be the best judge of La Dame aux Camélias. Well, if that is a vital book, and just because of its amazing vitality, a great book, Traviata is a great opera, because, unlike that much inferior opera Aïda, it is impossible to imagine any other music for it. All that could be expressed by that foolish dead love, all the sentimental dreams of it, all the cruelty of it, and the sweetness and the remorse, all is there. We may tire of its barrel-organ tunes, but we tire in middle-age of all youth’s facile emotions. We can scarcely imagine ourselves, let us say, waiting two hours in the rain for any woman. We should be bored by having to find the chocolates that Cleopatra preferred, and we would not escort even Helen of Troy to the nearest railway station. But fatigue is not necessarily wisdom, and so much that we reject in middle-age is due to loss of resiliency. We cannot react as we once could to the demands of the obvious excitement. We are, in a word, blasé.”
Nancy felt that she was rushing in like a fool, but she could not sit here and watch Kenrick blow away all argument in the wreaths of his cigarette smoke. She had to point out one flaw in his remarks.
“But when I said that I would never love again and implied that I knew what I was talking about, because I was twenty-eight, you warned me that a woman’s most susceptible age was thirty-three.”
“Thirty-three is hardly middle-age,” said Kenrick. “I was thinking of the chilly forties. Besides, you can’t compare women with men in this matter. The old saw about a woman being as old as she looks and a man as old as he feels is always used by women as an illustration of the advantage of being a man. As a matter of fact, the advantage lies all the other way. It is so much easier to look young than to feel young. A woman is never too old to be loved. You can hardly maintain that a man is never to old to love. I doubt if a man over thirty ever knows what love means.”