“That is very true,” the priest made haste to admit. “I didn't mean to say anything against women.”
And yet, at the woman's first glance and cry of horror and aversion, Mr. Schöninger's face had darkened. “Was he always to have these vulgar animosities intruded on him?” he asked himself.
It was one of those annoyances which a proud and fastidious person would like to have the power to banish for ever with a gesture of the hand or a word.
The two friends talked long together that night, and Mr. Schöninger told the priest quite freely all his plans.
“I shall stay here and take up my life where I left it off, except that I must now give up all contest for that disputed inheritance,” he said. “All I had has been thrown away in the struggle. Whether there would, in any case, have been a possible success for me I do not know. It is now too late. This infernal persecution—I shall never call it anything else, sir—has destroyed my last chance, and I have only to dismiss the subject from my mind as far as possible. I received to-day a letter signed by all my former pupils, begging me to resume my instruction of them. They expressed themselves very well, and I shall consent. The Unitarian minister has invited me to play the organ in their church, but I have not decided on that yet.”
“I would like to have you play in my church,” the priest said. “Our organist is dead, and the singing is getting to be miserable. Our music would, I am sure, be more pleasing to you; but, if doctrines make any difference, you would find yourself more at home with the Unitarians. I don't see any difference between them and the reformed Jews.”
“Doctrines do not make any difference, especially as I am not obliged to listen to them,” Mr. Schöninger replied with a dignity that verged on coldness. “In music I do not find any doctrines; and it is not necessary to believe in order to give the words their proper expression. Or rather, I might say that the artist has a poetical faith, a faith of the imagination, in all things grand, noble, or beautiful, and can utter with fervor, in his art, sentiments which have no place in his daily life; or, if they have a place, it is not such as would be assigned to them by the theologian. In his mind a pagan goddess and a Christian priest may have niches side by side, and it would be hard to say which he preferred. Your Raphael painted with equal delight and success a Madonna and a Galatea. Your Mozart wrote Masses and operas, and vastly preferred to write operas. He says that he wrote church music when he could do nothing else.”
“So much the worse for them!” said F. Chevreuse rather hotly. “Raphael would have painted better Madonnas—Madonnas which would have answered their true purpose of inspiring holy thoughts—if he had devoted his gifts entirely to God; and Mozart would have written better Masses, if he had done the same. When you see a thorough Christian artist, it will be one who will never lower himself to a subject contrary to, or disconnected [pg 497] with, religion. The others have been false, and consequently have had only glimpses where they might have had visions. Some of them were great, but they might have been immeasurably greater. No, I repeat, do not imagine that you are going to feel or play our music as you might if you were a good Catholic. But excuse me!” he said, recalling himself. “I have given you rather more of a lecture than I meant to. I still want you to take our music in hand, if you will.”
“I will with pleasure, if you will be content with my interpretation of it,” Mr. Schöninger said with a smile.
He was not in the least displeased with the priest's lecture, and, on the contrary, decidedly liked it. He was stirred by anything which consecrated art as an embodiment of the divine rather than a mere expression of the human.