The first time I ever saw her sister, Madame Viardot, she was sitting with mine, who introduced me to her; Pauline Viardot continued talking, now and then, however, stopping to look fixedly at me, and at last exclaimed, "Mais comme elle ressemble à ma Marie!" and one evening at a private concert in London, having arrived late, I remained standing by the folding-doors of the drawing-room, while Lablache finished a song which he had begun before I came in, at the end of which he came up to me and said, "You cannot think how you frightened me, when first I saw you standing in that doorway; you looked so absolutely like Malibran, que je ne savais en vérité pas ce que c'était." Malibran's appearance was a memorable event in the whole musical world of Europe, throughout which her progress from capital to capital was one uninterrupted triumph; the enthusiasm, as is general in such cases, growing with its further and wider spread, so that at Venice she was allowed, in spite of old-established law and custom, to go about in a gold and crimson gondola, as fine as the Bucentaur itself, instead of the floating hearses that haunt the sea-paved thoroughfares, and that did not please her gay and magnificent taste.
Her début in England was an absolute conquest of the nation; and when it was shocked by the news of her untimely death, hundreds of those unsympathetic, unæsthetic, unenthusiastic English people put mourning on for the wonderfully gifted young woman, snatched away in the midst of her brilliant career. Madame Malibran composed some charming songs, but her great reputation derives little of its luster from them,—that great reputation already a mere tradition.
At a challenge I would not decline, I ventured upon the following harsh and ungraceful but literal translation of some of the stanzas from Alfred de Musset's fine lament for Malibran. My poetical competitor produced an admirable version of them, and has achieved translations of other of his verses, as perfect as translations can be; a literary feat of extraordinary difficulty, with the works of so essentially national a writer, a genius so peculiarly French, as De Musset.
"Oh, Maria Felicia! the painter and bard
Behind them, in dying, leave undying heirs.
The night of oblivion their memory spares,
And their great eager souls, other action debarred,
Against death, against time, having valiantly warred,
Though struck down in the strife, claim its trophies as theirs.
"In the iron engraved, one his thought leaves enshrined;
With a golden-sweet cadence another's entwined
Makes for ever all those who shall hear it his friends.
Though he died, on the canvas lives Raphael's mind;
And from death's darkest doom till this world of ours ends,
The mother-clasped infant his glory defends.
"As the lamp guards the flame, so the bare, marble halls
Of the Parthenon keep, in their desolate space,
The memory of Phidias enshrined in their walls.
And Praxiteles' child, the young Venus, yet calls
From the altar, where, smiling, she still holds her place,
The centuries conquered to worship her grace.
"Thus from age after age, while new life they receive,
To rest at God's feet the old glories are gone;
And the accents of genius their echoes still weave
With the great human voice, till their speech is but one.
And of thee, dead but yesterday, all thy fame leaves
But a cross in the dim chapel's darkness, alone.
"A cross and oblivion, silence, and death!
Hark! the wind's softest sob; hark! the ocean's deep breath!
Hark! the fisher boy singing his way o'er the plains!
Of thy glory, thy hope, thy young beauty's bright wreath,
Not a trace, not a sigh, not an echo remains."
Those Garcia sisters were among the most remarkable people of their day, not only for their peculiar high artistic gifts, their admirable musical and dramatic powers, but for the vivid originality of their genius and great general cultivation. Malibran danced almost as well as she sang, and once took a principal part in a ballet. She drew and painted well, as did her sister Pauline Viardot, whose spirited caricatures of her friends, and herself were admirable specimens both of likenesses and of humorous talent in delineating them. Both sisters conversed brilliantly, speaking fluently four languages, and executed the music of different nations and composers with a perception of the peculiar character of each that was extraordinary. They were mistresses of all the different schools of religious, dramatic, and national compositions, and Gluck, Jomelli, Pergolesi, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, Scotch and Irish melodies, Neapolitan canzonette, and the popular airs of their own country, were all rendered by them with equal mastery.
To resume my story (which is very like that of the knife-grinder). When I returned to the stage, many years after I had first appeared on it, I restored the beautiful end of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" as he wrote it (in spite of Garrick and the original story), thinking it mere profanation to intrude sharp discords of piercing agony into the divine harmony of woe with which it closes.