"They are all the same," he said, after reading half a dozen, and Ulick felt relieved. "But stay, this one is different," and the long slip dismayed Ulick, who could not feel much interest in the impression that Evelyn had created as Elsa—he did not know how many years ago.
"'Miss Innes is a tall, graceful woman, who crosses the stage with slow, harmonious movements—any slight quickening of her step awakening a sense of foreboding in the spectator. Her eyes, too, are of great avail, and the moment she comes on the stage one is attracted by their strangeness—grave, mysterious, earnest eyes, which smile rarely; but when they do smile happiness seems to mount up from within, illuminating her life from end to end. She will never be unhappy again, one thinks. It is with her smile she recompenses her champion knight when he lays low Telramund, and it is with her smile she wins his love—and ours. We regret, for her sake, there are so few smiles in Wagner: very few indeed—not one in 'Senta' nor in 'Elizabeth.'" The newspaper cutting slipped from Owen's hand, and he talked for a long time about her walk and her smile, and then about her "Iphigenia," which he declared to be one of the most beautiful performances ever seen, her personality lending itself to the incarnation of this Greek idea of fate and self-sacrifice. But Gluck's music was, in Owen's opinion, old-fashioned even at the time it was written—containing beautiful things, of course, but somewhat stiff in the joints, lacking the clear insight and direct expression of Beethoven's. "One man used to write about her very well, and seemed to understand her better than any other. And writing about this performance he says—Now, if I could find you his article." The search proved a long one, but as it was about to be abandoned Owen turned up the cutting he was in search of.
"'Her nature intended her for the representation of ideal heroines whose love is pure, and it does not allow her to depict the violence of physical passion and the delirium of the senses. She is an artist of the peaks, whose feet may not descend into the plain and follow its ignominious route,' And then here: 'He who has seen her as the spotless spouse of the son of Parsifal, standing by the window, has assisted at the mystery of the chaste soul awaiting the coming of her predestined lover,' And 'He who has seen her as Elizabeth, ascending the hillside, has felt the nostalgia of the skies awaken in his heart,' Then he goes on to say that her special genius and her antecedents led her to 'Fidelio,' and designed her as the perfect embodiment of Leonore's soul—that pure, beautiful soul made wholly of sacrifice and love,' But you never saw her as Leonore so you can form no idea of what she really was,"
"I will read you what she wrote when she was studying 'Fidelio': 'Beethoven's music has nothing in common with the passion of the flesh; it lives in the realms of noble affections, pity, tenderness, love, spiritual yearnings for the life beyond the world, and its joy in the external world is as innocent as a happy child's. It is in this sense classical—it lives and loves and breathes in spheres of feeling and thought removed from the ordinary life of men. Wagner's later work, if we except some scenes from "The Ring"—notably the scenes between Wotan and Brunnhilde—is nearer to the life of the senses; its humanity is fresh in us, deep as Brunnhilde's; but essential man lives in the spirit. The desire of the flesh is more necessary to the life of the world than the aspirations of the soul, yet the aspirations of the soul are more human. The root is more necessary to the plant than its flower, but it is by the flower and not by the root that we know it."
"Is it not amazing that a woman who could think like that should be capable of flinging up her art—the art which I gave her—on account of the preaching of that wooden-headed Mostyn?" Sitting down suddenly he opened a drawer, and, taking out her photograph, he said: "Here she is as Leonore, but you should have seen her in the part. The photograph gives no idea whatever; you haven't seen her picture. Come, let me show you her picture: one of the most beautiful pictures that —— ever painted; the most beautiful in the room, and there are many beautiful things in this room. Isn't it extraordinary that a woman so beautiful, so gifted, so enchanting, so intended by life for life should be taken with the religious idea suddenly? She has gone mad without doubt. A woman who could do the things that she could do to pass over to religion, to scapulars, rosaries, indulgencies! My God! my God!" and he fell back in his armchair, and did not speak again for a long time. Getting up suddenly, he said, "If you want to smoke any more there are cigars on the table; I am going to bed."
"Well, it is hard upon him," Ulick said as he took a cigar; and lighting his candle, he wandered up the great green staircase by himself, seeking the room he had been given at the end of one of the long corridors.
XII
"Did it ever occur to you," Owen said one evening, as the men sat smoking after dinner, after the servant had brought in the whisky and seltzer, between eleven and twelve, in that happy hour when the spirit descends and men and women sitting together are taken with a desire to communicate the incommunicable part of themselves—"did it ever occur to you," Owen said, blowing the smoke and sipping his whisky and seltzer from time to time, "that man is the most ridiculous animal on the face of this earth?"
"You include women?" Ulick asked.
"No, certainly not; women are not nearly so ridiculous, because they are more instinctive, more like the animals which we call the lower animals in our absurd self-conceit. As I have often said, women have never invented a religion; they are untainted with that madness, and they are not moralists. They accept the religions men invent, and sometimes they become saints, and they accept our moralities—what can they do, poor darlings, but accept? But they are not interested in moralities, or in religions. How can they be? They are the substance out of which life comes, whereas we are but the spirit, the crazy spirit—the lunatic crying for the moon. Spirit and substance being dependent one on the other, concessions have to be made; the substance in want of the spirit acquiesces, says, 'Very well, I will be religious and moral too.' Then the spirit and the substance are married. The substance has been infected—"