“No, I do not.”
“Where did you see her?”
“At the play.”
“The scene of despair was played as it had never been played before.” “The Polichinelle of the Fair has a voice, but no delicacy, no soul.” “Madame So-and-so has produced two at a birth; each father will have his own child....” And yet you suppose that this kind of thing, said and said again, and listened to every day of the week, sets the soul aglow and leads to mighty things.
I.—Nay, it were better to turn the key of one’s garret, drink cold water, eat dry bread, and seek one’s true self.
He.—Maybe, but I have not the courage. And then the idea of sacrificing one’s happiness for the sake of a success that is doubtful! And the name that I bear? Rameau! It is not with talents as it is with nobility; nobility transmits itself, and increases in lustre by passing from grandfather to father, and from father to son, and from son to grandson, without the ancestor impressing a spark of merit on his descendant; the old stock ramifies into an enormous crop of fools; but what matter? It is not so with talents. Merely to obtain the renown of your father, you must be cleverer than he was; you must have inherited his fibre. The fibre has failed me, but the wrist is nimble, the fiddle-bow scrapes away, and the pot boils; if there is not glory, there is broth.
I.—If I were in your place, I would not take it for granted; I would try.... Whatever it be that a man applies himself to, nature meant him for it.
He.—She makes mighty blunders. For my part, I do not look down from heights, whence all seems confused and blurred,—the man who prunes a tree with his knife, all one with the caterpillar who devours its leaf; a couple of insects, each at his proper task. Do you, if you choose, perch yourself on the epicycle of the planet Mercury, and thence distribute creation, in imitation, of Réaumur; he, the classes of flies into seamstresses, surveyors, reapers; you, the human species into joiners, dancers, singers, tilers. That is your affair, and I will not meddle with it. I am in this world, and in this world I rest. But if it is in nature to have an appetite—for it is always to appetite that I come back, and to the sensation that is ever present to me—then I find that it is by no means consistent with good order not to have always something to eat. What a precious economy of things! Men who are over-crammed with everything under the sun, while others, who have a stomach just as importunate as they, a hunger that recurs as regularly as theirs, have not a bite. The worst is the constrained posture to which want pins us down. The needy man does not walk like anybody else; he jumps, he crawls, he wriggles, he limps, he passes his whole life in taking and executing artificial postures.
I.—What are postures?
He.—Ask Noverre.[226] The world offers far more of them than his art can imitate.