109.
Talking once with Adelaide Kemble, after she had been singing in the “Figaro,” she compared the music to the bosom of a full blown rose in its voluptuous, intoxicating richness. I said that some of Mozart’s melodies seemed to me not so much composed, but found—found on some sunshiny day in Arcadia, among nymphs and flowers. “Yes,” she replied, with ready and felicitous expression, “not inventions, but existences.”
110.
Old George the Third, in his blindness and madness, once insisted on making the selection of pieces for the concert of ancient music (May, 1811),—it was soon after the death of the Princess Amelia. “The programme included some of the finest passages in Handel’s ‘Samson,’ descriptive of blindness; the ‘Lamentation of Jephthah,’ for his daughter; Purcel’s ‘Mad Tom,’ and closed with ‘God save the King,’ to make sure the application of all that went before.”
111.
Every one who remembers what Madlle. Rachel was seven or eight years ago, and who sees her now (1853), will allow that she has made no progress in any of the essential excellences of her art:—a certain proof that she is not a great artist in the true sense of the word. She is a finished actress, but she is nothing more, and nothing better; not enough the artist ever to forget or conceal her art; consequently there is a want somewhere, which a mind highly toned and of quick perceptions feels from beginning to end. The parts in which she once excelled—the Phêdre and the Hermione, for instance—have become formalised and hard, like studies cast in bronze; and when she plays a new part it has no freshness. I always go to see her whenever I can. I admire her as what she is—the Parisian actress, practised in every trick of her métier. I admire what she does, I think how well it is all done, and am inclined to clap and applaud her drapery, perfect and ostentatiously studied in every fold, just with the same feeling that I applaud herself.