It’s just the same at Venice, I detest the Grand Canal and I don’t know anything so touching as the little alleys. But it’s all a question of one’s surroundings.” “But,” I remarked to her, feeling that the only way to rehabilitate Poussin in Mme. de Cambremer’s eyes was to inform her that he was once more in fashion, “M. Degas assures us that he knows nothing more beautiful than the Poussins at Chantilly.” “Indeed? I don’t know the ones at Chantilly,” said Mme. de Cambremer who had no wish to differ from Degas, “but I can speak about the ones in the Louvre, which are appalling.” “He admires them immensely too.” “I must look at them again.
My impressions of them are rather distant,” she replied after a moment’s silence, and as though the favourable opinion which she was certain, before very long, to form of Poussin would depend, not upon the information that I had just communicated to her, but upon the supplementary and, this time, final examination that she intended to make of the Poussins in the Louvre in order to be in a position to change her mind. Contenting myself with what was a first step towards retraction since, if she did not yet admire the Poussins, she was adjourning the matter for further consideration, in order not to keep her on tenterhooks any longer, I told her mother-in-law how much I had heard of the wonderful flowers at Féterne.
In modest terms she spoke of the little presbytery garden that she had behind the house, into which in the mornings, by simply pushing open a door, she went in her wrapper to feed her peacocks, hunt for new-laid eggs, and gather the zinnias or roses which, on the sideboard, framing the creamed eggs or fried fish in a border of flowers, reminded her of her garden paths. “It is true, we have a great many roses,” she told me, “our rose garden is almost too near the house, there are days when it makes my head ache.
It is nicer on the terrace at la Raspelière where the breeze carries the scent of the roses, but it is not so heady.” I turned to her daughter-in-law. “It is just like Pelléas,” I said to her, to gratify her taste for the modern, “that scent of roses wafted up to the terraces. It is so strong in the score that, as I suffer from hay-fever and rose-fever, it sets me sneezing every time I listen to that scene.”
“What a marvellous thing Pelléas is,” cried Mme. de Cambremer, “I’m mad about it;” and, drawing closer to me with the gestures of a savage woman seeking to captivate me, using her fingers to pick out imaginary notes, she began to hum something which, I supposed, represented to her the farewells of Pelléas, and continued with a vehement persistence as though it had been important that Mme. de Cambremer should at that moment remind me of that scene or rather should prove to me that she herself remembered it.
“I think it is even finer than Parsifal,” she added, “because in Parsifal the most beautiful things are surrounded with a sort of halo of melodious phrases, which are bad simply because they are melodious.” “I know, you are a great musician, Madame,” I said to the dowager.
“I should so much like to hear you play.” Mme. de Cambremer-Legrandin gazed at the sea so as not to be drawn into the conversation. Being of the opinion that what her mother-in-law liked was not music at all, she regarded the talent, a sham talent according to her, though in reality of the very highest order that the other was admitted to possess as a technical accomplishment devoid of interest.
It was true that Chopin’s only surviving pupil declared, and with justice, that the Master’s style of playing, his ‘feeling’ had been transmitted, through herself, to Mme. de Cambremer alone, but to play like Chopin was far from being a recommendation in the eyes of Legran-din’s sister, who despised nobody so much as the Polish composer. “Oh! They are flying away,” exclaimed Albertine, pointing to the gulls which, casting aside for a moment their flowery incognito, were rising in a body towards the sun. “Their giant wings from walking hinder them,” quoted Mme. de Cambremer, confusing the seagull with the albatross.
“I do love them; I used to see them at Amsterdam,” said Albertine. “They smell of the sea, they come and breathe the salt air through the paving stones even.” “Oh! So you have been in Holland, you know the Vermeers?” Mme. de Cambremer asked imperiously, in the tone in which she would have said: “You know the Guermantes?” for snobbishness in changing its subject does not change its accent. Albertine replied in the negative, thinking that they were living people. But her mistake was not apparent. “I should be delighted to play to you,” Mme. de Cambremer said to me. “But you know I only play things that no longer appeal to your generation.
I was brought up in the worship of Chopin,” she said in a lowered tone, for she was afraid of her daughter-in-law, and knew that to the latter, who considered that Chopin was not music,_playing him well or badly were meaningless terms. She admitted that her mother-in-law had technique, was a finished pianist. “Nothing will ever make me say that she is a musician,” was Mme. de Cambremer-Legrandin’s conclusion.
Because she considered herself ‘advanced,’ because (hi matters of art only) “one could never move far enough to the Left,” she said, she maintained not merely that music progressed, but that it progressed along one straight line, and that Debussy was in a sense a super-Wagner, slightly more advanced again than Wagner. She did not take into account the fact that if Debussy was not as independent of Wagner as she herself was to suppose in a few years’ time, because we must always make use of the weapons that we have captured to free ourselves finally from the foe whom we have for the moment overpowered, he was seeking nevertheless, after the feeling of satiety that people were beginning to derive from work that was too complete, in which everything was expressed, to satisfy an opposite demand.
There were theories of course, to support this reaction for the time being, like those theories which, in politics, come to the support of the laws against religious communities, of wars in the East (unnatural teaching, the Yellow Peril, etc., etc.). People said that an age of speed required rapidity in art, precisely as they might have said that the next war could not last longer than a fortnight, or that the coming of railways would kill the little places beloved of the coaches, which the motor-car, for all that, was to restore to favour.
Composers were warned not to strain the attention of their audience, as though we had not at our disposal different degrees of attention, among which it rests precisely with the artist himself to arouse the highest. For the people who yawn with boredom after ten lines of a mediocre article have journeyed year after year to Bayreuth to listen to the Ring. Besides, the day was to come when, for a season, Debussy would be pronounced as trivial as Massenet, and the trills of Mélisande degraded to the level of Manon’s. For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their warfare ensure the continuity of existence. But that time was still to come.
As on the Stock Exchange, when a rise occurs, a whole group of securities benefit by it, so a certain number of despised composers were gaining by the reaction, either because they did not deserve such scorn, or simply—which enabled one to be original when one sang their praises—because they had incurred it. And people even went the length of seeking out, in an isolated past, men of independent talent upon whose reputation the present movement did not seem calculated to have any influence, but of whom one of the new masters was understood to have spoken favourably. Often it was because a master, whoever he may be, however exclusive his school, judges in the light of his own untutored instincts, does justice to talent wherever it be found, or rather not so much to talent as to some agreeable inspiration which he has enjoyed in the past, which reminds him of a precious moment in his adolescence.
Or, it may be, because certain artists of an earlier generation have in some fragment of their work realised something that resembles what the master has gradually become aware that he himself meant at one time to create. Then he sees the old master as a sort of precursor; he values in him, under a wholly different form, an effort that is momentarily, partially fraternal. There are bits of Turner in the work of Poussin, we find a phrase of Flaubert in Montesquieu.
Sometimes, again, this rumoured predilection of the Master was due to an error, starting heaven knows where and circulated through the school. But in that case the name mentioned profited by the auspices under which it was introduced in the nick of time, for if there is an element of free will, some genuine taste expressed in the master’s choice, the schools themselves go only by theory. Thus it is that the mind, following its habitual course which advances by digression, inclining
