Write to me often and I will fill my letters with the sweetest of nothings if you will. Love and adieu and think of me as your devoted friend,
Ellen.
From the Baroness Von Eulaw to Mrs. Perces Thornton.
Berlin, May 10, 1893.
Dearest Mother: “Let fate do her worst, there are moments of joy,” and such moments I owe to my fondness for music. What would have been all these dreary weeks and months of shallow acting, if the depths of my soul had not been stirred by the genius of that creative force which, mocking at our own crude disguises, rehabilitates pain with the fair seeming of pleasure, which relegates near sorrows to the realms of tradition, and illusionises common care?
Art, in any form, I conceive to be the benefactor of the human race. If truth, shorn of its infinitude of possibilities, constitutes the religion of the civilized world, if the deus et machina, as Æschylus somewhere has it, unlyrical and unleavened by beauty of device, by rhetoric or action and climax, be persuasive and instructive and inspiring, then how ineffably shall truth have gained by the development of its powers through visible forms of dramatic conceit, through association with the elements of art, through characterization, through skillful adaptation, through harmonized mediæ of appeal to the sense or the sentiment, the sympathies or the imagination?
I am reminded here of an incident which occurred in our box at the Grand Opera House, during a late performance of Die Meistersinger, which resulted—as is not unusual in these days—unpleasantly. My husband, as you may remember, affects music solely for the paraphernalia of the stage, for the glitter and show of boxes and stalls, for the exposed shoulders of the diamonded dames of fashion, for the numbers of men with eyeglasses and uniforms—anything, in fact, but the music, which rather bores him.
Therefore it is I apprehend that he discusses music so incomprehensibly—to say the least—I would not say irrationally. Somewhere during the development of the plot I was struck with the similarity of the dramatic motive with that of the Greek tragedies, especially the choral odes, where occurs the element of transition which some scholars call the evolutionary or perhaps the re-incarnating period of the ancient drama. This similarity—in some ways identical—I inadvertently alluded to in a more or less critical review of the opera and its construction, which I ventured between acts, in the presence of a party of Americans who were our guests for the occasion.
Suddenly as thought, the baron’s face was aflame. But “what it were unwise to do ’twere weaker to regret,” and I prepared to defend my position as best became me. “You call my divine countryman a plagiarist,” he hissed between his teeth. Our male guest glowered, and the ladies with heightened color looked at the orchestra.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said I, with an assumed smile, “I did not say so, though I admit that my suggestion was unfortunate in its inference.”