"The magic of art! Oh, how rude, everyday life sweeps it away! Attend an operatic rehearsal, listen to the confused cries of the manager, the conductor, the bars of music constantly broken off; the musical howls of the chorus; visit the theatrical wardrobe, and look at the tinsel out of which the artistic work of our beauty is created for an evening's performance; listen to the criticising comments of our colleagues behind the scenes; you will be in doubt where you should seek the magic of art."
"Still it does exist, and before its power disappears the ponderous apparatus by which it must be called into life."
"Certainly in the emotions of creative and sensitive minds it bears an enduring life. But when the magic forsakes us, who should be the representatives of art? Is there a greater pain than the sensation of one's own uselessness, and in addition, when it is unmerited, when it was formerly foreign to us? A singer whose voice becomes weaker, who from day to day becomes more conscious of its decay, is more fitted for elegiac reflections than a crumbling ruin, around which ivy climbs."
"You speak, dear friend, of matters which it is to be hoped you do not know from personal experience?"
"Yet I do know them by experience. I tell it you in confidence; before the world I must seek to conceal it, my fame may be able to disguise for some time longer what is unavoidable--a good name has illimitable credit. But my enemies are already beginning to destroy it. A spiteful reporter in Riga made exaggerated allusions to the deterioration of my voice, and a local newspaper here, which bears the impress of Herr Spiegeler's intellect, hastened to print a copy of that criticism."
Blanden shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.
"You are mistaken if you estimate lightly this intentional undermining of a well-earned renown. It cannot be accurately shown out of what atoms an artist's fame gradually rises, nor how they are wafted into a whole, just as easily can it be blown into pieces! How quickly the colours glow in a gay, shimmering structure of clouds; fame, too, is but effulgence, and suddenly dead night comes to relieve its light. Singers, both men and women, are condemned before all others to outlive their fame."
"Nor do they receive it freshly in their hands at first."
"Oh, no, it withers for them--in their hands! Read the article which Spiegeler has to-day had printed upon my 'Somnambula,' such an article is a blight upon every blossom of renown. They are all tiny half-concealed pieces of malice, but they hit one's heart. Public opinion is easily led, to-morrow already I shall stand before hundreds who no longer believe in me. Ah fame! How paralysing is the sensation of being given up to the crowd's want of faith."
"All great artists have been exposed to such attacks."