“Not in the least. Why should not a complexion be as fine a work of art as a canvas that hangs on the line? As for nature—I have seen nothing so exquisite in Venice as the pictures of Turner.”
“I have worked out a make-up which enables me to delude the world into the belief that I am a beauty. But it is not merely these minor arts that disguise me; I am transfigured, even when I merely sing Venus or Senta; and that is the reason I have never been recognized in Bayreuth, where the elect of America are beginning to flock.”
“You change your eyes in both size and expression, but I should know you.”
“Now, perhaps, that my characters have become a part of myself.” She added abruptly, “I believe you know nothing in England of Ibsen, but he is the only dramatist who, in some moods, makes me wish that I were on the other stage.”
“I made my first teacher in Munich translate several of his plays: first, because it was a straight path away from declensions, then because I became interested. I never miss an Ibsen night, unless it happens to be one of yours. I hardly know whether I like him or not—yes, I suppose I do; that is to say, he fascinates my mind, while I resent him with all my inherited particles, that cry out in favour of illusions and lies.”
“Ah!” She looked at him with keen interest. “It may be those uncompromising pictures of middle-class life, mean, sordid, bare, that excite your mere curiosity—you are a pampered baby yourself. But you are too young to hate shams.”
“I am sure that I love them. Perhaps he merely induces an irritability of mind, which is a novel sensation. I shouldn’t wonder if I really hated him. I cannot imagine you in any of these rôles. You do not suggest his heroines—you whose mission it is to give intense reality to impossible romance.”
“In other words you deny my right to be called an actress?”
“Oh! oh! How can you say such a thing? I have a theory that Wagner’s music changed the character of the void itself. The souls floating downward vibrated to the new harmonies, the least of them; and now and again a great one was saturated, absorbed, imperiously impelled—”
“I never heard a more ingenious theory, but considering that Tristan was written in ’57-’59, and Götterdämmerung nearly fifteen years later—”