CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
On account of the numerous rehearsals demanded by Evelyn for the production of "Tristan and Isolde," Mr. Hermann Goetze's opera season was limited to four nights a week. But the hours she spent in the theatre were only a small part of the time she devoted to her idea. Her entire life was lived in or about the new incarnation, her whole life seemed to converge and rush into an ultimate channel, and Lady Ascott sought her in vain. She avoided social distractions, and the friends she saw were those who could talk to her about her idea. But while listening she forgot them, and absorbed in her dream strayed round the piano. She meditated journeys to Cornwall and Brittany; and one day when Owen called he heard that she had gone to Ireland, and was expected back to-morrow evening. She read Isolde into the morning paper, receiving hints from the cases that came up before the magistrates. She found Isolde in every book, all that happened seemed extraordinarily fortuitous, the light of her idea revealing significance in the most ordinary things. Her life was ransacked like an old work-box, all kinds of stages of mentality, opinions, beliefs, prejudices, trite and conventional enough, came up and were thrown aside. But now and then the memory of an emotion, of a feeling, would prove to be just what she wanted to add a moment's life to her Isolde; the memory of a gesture, of a look was sufficient, and she sank back in her chair, her eyes dilated and moody, thinking how she could work this truth to herself into the harmony of the picture she was elaborating.
Evelyn had seen Rosa Sucher play the part, and had admired her rendering as far as we can admire that which is not only antagonistic, but even discordant to our own natures. She admitted it to be very sweeping, triumphant and loud, a fine braying of trumpets from the rise to the fall of the curtain. Rosa Sucher had no doubt attained an extraordinary oneness of idea, but at what price? Her Isolde was a hurricane, a sort of avalanche; and the woman was lost in the storm. She had missed the magic of the woman who, personal to our flesh and dream, breaks upon our life like the Spring; and this was just what Evelyn wanted to out on the stage. There was plenty of breadth, but it was breadth at the price of accent. There was a great frame and a sort of design within the frame, but in Evelyn's sense the picture was wanting. There was an extraordinary and incomprehensible neglect of that personal accent without which there is no life. And the difference between the Isolde who has not drunk, and the Isolde who has drunk the love potion which she, Evelyn, was so intent upon indicating, had never occurred to Rosa Sucher, or if it had, it had been swept aside as a negligible detail. After all, Isolde has to be a woman a man could be in love with, and that is not the impact and the shriek of a gale from the south-west. No doubt Rosa Sucher's idea of the part was Wagner's idea at one moment of his life. Wagner was a man with hundreds of ideas; he tried them all, retaining some and discarding others. Some half-dozen have fixed themselves immutably in certain minds, and an undue importance is given to them, an importance that Wagner would never have allowed. The absurd idea, propounded in the heat of controversy, that all the arts were to wax to one art in the music drama, that even sculpture was to be represented by attitudes of the actors and actresses! Wagner had written this thing in order to confound his enemies and bring the weak-kneed to his side, or maybe, it was merely written to make himself clear to himself. For it was impossible that a man of genius should be so seriously wanting in appreciation of sculpture as to think with the centre of his brain, that an actor standing, his hand on his hip, could fill the place hitherto occupied in the mind by, let us say, the Hermes of Praxiteles. Yet this idea still obtained at Bayreuth, and Rosa Sucher walked about, her arms raised and posed above her head, in the conventional, statuesque attitude designed for the decoration of beer gardens.
"It really is very sad," Evelyn said, her eyes twinkling with the humour of the idea, "that anyone should think that such figuration could replace sculpture."
"But you will not deny that the actor and the actress can supply part of the picturesqueness of a dramatic action."
"No, indeed; but not by attitudinising, but by gestures that tell the emotion that is in the mind."
By some obscure route of which they were not aware, these artistic discussions wound around the idea which dominated their minds, and they were led back to it continually. The story of "Tristan and Isolde" seemed to be their own story, and when their eyes met, each divined what was passing in the other's mind. The music was afloat on the currents of their blood. It gathered in the brain, paralysing it, and the nervous exhaustion was unbearable about six, when the servant had taken away the tea things; and as the afternoon drooped and the beauty of the summer evening began in the park, speech seemed vain, and they could not bring themselves to argue any longer.
It was quite true that she had begun to feel the blankness of the positivist creed, if it were possible to call it a creed. There seemed nothing left of it, it seemed to have shrivelled up like a little withered leaf; true or false, it meant nothing to her, it crushed up like a dried leaf, and the dust escaped through her fingers. Then without any particular reason she remembered a phrase she had heard in the theatre.
"As I always says, if one man isn't enough for a woman, twenty aren't too many."