P.S.—My sincere congratulations for the cross of St. Sylvestre. People outside are quite mistaken in thinking that they are lavish with decorations here.
I have informed the Princess W. of your kind arrangements relative to the edition of the work that Monseigneur de Montault mentioned to you.
62. To Madame Jessie Laussot
Dear Maestra,
No one knows better than you how to relieve the virtue of obligingness by the most cordial kindness. You make a point of persuading your friends that you are in their debt for the services you render them. In so far as they give you the opportunity of exercising your fine qualities you are perfectly right, but further than that you are not; and for my part I beg you to be as fully assured of my sincere gratitude as of my entire devotion.
I am not going to set about pitying you much for the difficulties and contradictions that your artistic zeal encounters. The world is so formed that the practice of the Good and the search for the Better is not made agreeable to any one; not in the things of Art, which appear the most inoffensive, any more than in other things. In order to deserve well one must learn to endure well. The best specific for the prejudice, malice, imbroglios and injustice of others is not to trouble oneself about them. It seems that such and such people find their pleasure where we should not in the least look for it: so be it, reserving to ourselves to find ours in nobler sources. Besides, how could we dare to lament over difficulties that run counter to our good pleasure? Have not the worthiest and most illustrious servants of Art had to suffer far more than we?…This consolation has its melancholy side, I know; nevertheless it confirms the active conscience in the right road.
This a propos of the prelude extra muros of your last concerts.
Let us pass on to the programmes of them, dear and victorious
Maestra.
The "Panis Angelicus," [By Palestrina.] the Schumann Quintet and the sublime Prelude to "Lohengrin" are works which a well- brought-up public ought to know by heart. You will do well therefore to reproduce them often. There is no criticism admissible on this subject; and, if you absolutely exact it that I should make one at all, it would only be on the adjective "celebrated," appended to the Schumann Quintet, which would do without it without disadvantage. Pardon me this hairsplitting.-
As to the "Beatitudes" I entirely approve of your not having exhibited them a second time. You know, moreover, that I usually dissuade my friends from encumbering concert programmes with my compositions. For the little they have to lose they will not lose it by waiting. Let us then administer them in homoeopathic doses- -and rarely.
I am delighted with what you tell me of Wilhelmj. Please assure him of my best regard and of the pleasure I shall have in showing it to him with more consequence. The Concerto for which he asks has already been begged for several times from me by Sivori and Remenyi. I don't know when I shall find time to write it. There is not the least hurry for it, as long as criticism constrains violin-virtuosi to limit themselves to a repertoire of four or five pieces, very beautiful doubtless, and no less well known. Joachim naively confessed to me that after he had played the Beethoven and Mendelssohn Concertos and the Bach Chaconne he did not know what to do with himself in a town unless it were to go on playing indefinitely the same two Concertos and the same Chaconne.