From yon high wide-sphered home,
To where thy longing soul swings upward now.
Our apologies to Mr. Spielhagen for that more than atrocious twelfth line and for the other deficiencies! But the last line is particularly keen in its photography. It has the spirit of her.
After much touring in Europe she came to this country and played under the same promising conditions. The critics predicted that if she should decide to stay here she would probably out-rival our own few noted women violinists. And then came a period of sorrow, bereavement, hardship, and illness—and in the meantime the problem of living. That problem becomes a real one when an artist loves life just a bit more than her art and refuses to make that spiritual compromise which life tries to wrest from one in the hard places. One must live, and it takes money to do it rather than art. The romantic notion that all genius has to do is to stand up and make itself heard is one of the silliest notions the great public suffers from. Only the hundredth person recognizes genius when it proclaims itself; the rest are as blind as this department-store audience until the sign-posts have been put up, with letters large enough to be easily read. Also, the amount of machinery and money involved in the arrangement of concert engagements would surprise the public as much as the true stories of what it costs the “wealthy patron” to get his artist started toward recognition.
And so this particular genius will continue for a while to cast her pearls in a lunch-room, and a few of the discerning will find her out and thank their stars that they may hear such beauty at the small cost of a bad club sandwich and a worse cup of coffee.
If you go there you will be haunted by music for days afterward. I say “haunted” because that is the only word to describe your feeling of pursuit by melody. And I think I have discovered the reason for it. A poet once said that the only permanent emotion we human beings are capable of is—not love, as we like to imagine—but longing. And that is what this music says to you. It is the very essence of longing—the eternal seeking, the rapturous satisfaction, the disappointment, and the renewed quest. I have never heard such a quality of sehnsucht in any music; it is almost more than you can bear. Of course, in these surroundings, you must listen to the complete gamut of new popular songs; but at intervals, when the managerial demand for “noise” can be ignored for a moment, you will be rewarded by the Thais Meditation or a Schutt waltz or that exquisite Saint-Saens poem called The Swan—or even a Tschaikowsky song. Where does the tone come from, you keep wondering? Not from a wooden instrument, not from small human fingers, surely. It is tone of such richness and depth that you sometimes have the illusion of each note being sung twice. “It transcends music to me entirely and becomes a matter of life—or of soul,” said a critic who listened with me the other day.
Through it all the artist’s earnest face is still and unchanging. That is part of the fascination—the contrast of that tumultuous singing and the thoughtful, dreaming face that seems to control it all. “My violin belongs to me—yes,” she says, “but that is such a cold word. It is part of my body. I feel it is growing on me just like my arms and hands. I could not live without it.” If you watch her closely you will decide that her playing is the result of an extraordinary sensitiveness to life. If you know her, as I do, you will expand that judgment to this one: an extraordinary strength about life; for she is both deep and strong—qualities that are supposed to be inseparable, but which are so rarely found together that their combination means—a great spirit.
I am afraid I am too much of a musician not to be a romanticist. With out music life to me would be a mistake.—Nietzsche to Brandes, 1888.
All restlessness, misery, all crime, is the result of the betrayal of one’s inner life.—Will Lexington Comfort in “Midstream.”