The father, following with his gaze the smoke rising over the roof, dwells on the peaceful scenes of his past which the evening light illuminates with a distant magical glow; he thinks of his imminent death, and the life his children will lead after his death; and thus the soul of the entire family ascends with religious feeling towards the setting sun, while the great lime, chestnut or pine tree casts over them all the blessing of its exquisite odour or its venerable shade.
But for a family that is really alive, one in which every member thinks, loves and acts, for a family which has a soul, how much sweeter it is, when evening comes, for this soul to be able to find embodiment in a voice, in the clear and inexhaustible voice of a young girl or a young man lucky enough to possess a gift for music and song. The stranger walking past the garden gate when the family is sitting in silence would fear, if he approached, to disturb the almost religious dream that each of them harbours; but if this stranger, without being able to hear the song, could see the gathering of friends and family listening, how much more he would imagine they were attending some invisible mass; in other words, despite their diverse postures, how much the resemblance between the expressions on their faces would demonstrate the true unity of their souls, attained for a few moments by the attraction they feel for one and the same ideal drama, by their communion with one and the same dream. Every now and then, just as the wind bends the grass and makes the branches sway to and fro, an unseen breath bends their heads or makes them look up suddenly.
Then, as if a messenger invisible to you were recounting some exciting tale, all of them seem to be anxiously awaiting, listening with delight or terror to the same news which nonetheless arouses different echoes in each of them. The anguish of the music reaches a peak; its moments of aspiration suddenly collapse, only to be followed by even more desperate aspirations. Its boundless glowing expanses, its mysterious darkness, represent for the old man the vast spectacle of life and death, for the child the urgent promises of land and sea, for the man in love the mysterious infinity and the glowing darkness of passion. The thinker sees his inner life flow by in its entirety; the dying falls of the melody are his own dying falls, and his whole heart lifts and leaps forward again when the melody resumes its flight.
The powerful murmur of the harmonies makes the rich dark depths of his memory quiver. The man of action starts breathing heavily at the clash of the chords, and the gallop of the vivaces; he triumphs majestically in the adagios. Even the unfaithful wife senses that the error of her ways has been pardoned, infinitized – an error which also took its divine origin from the dissatisfaction of a heart that had not been assuaged by the usual joys and had gone astray, but only because of its quest for mystery; its vastest aspirations are fulfilled by this music, full to the brim like the voice of church bells.
The musician, despite claiming to enjoy in music only its technical side, also feels these meaningful emotions, but they are enveloped in his sense of musical beauty, a feeling which conceals those emotions from him. And last but not least, I myself, listening in music to the most vast and universal beauty of life and death, sea and sky, I also feel in it everything that is most individual and unique in your allure, my dearest beloved.
5
The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the coarsest and most unpleasant prejudices of today had their moment of novelty, in which fashion lent them its fragile grace. Many of today’s women want to free themselves from all prejudices, and by “prejudices” they mean “principles”. That is their prejudice – a burdensome one, even though they adorn themselves with it as though it were a delicate and somewhat strange flower. They think that nothing has any hidden background; they put everything on the same level. They enjoy a book, or life itself, as if it were a nice day or an orange.
They speak of the “art” of a dressmaker or the “philosophy” of “Parisian life”. They would be abashed if they had to classify anything or judge anything, and say: this is good, this is bad. In former times, when a woman behaved well, it was as it were an act of vengeance on the part of her moral being – her thought – over her instinctual nature. Today, when a woman behaves well, it is an act of vengeance on the part of her instinctual nature over her moral being, i.e. her theoretical immorality (see the plays of MM. Halévy and Meilhac).* Now that all moral and social bonds are growing really slack, women drift from this theoretical immorality to that instinctual goodness.
They seek only pleasure and find it only when they are not seeking it, when they suffer involuntarily. This scepticism and this dilettantism would be shocking in books, like an old-fashioned piece of jewellery. But women, far from being the oracles of intellectual fashion, are rather its belated parrots. Even today, dilettantism pleases them and suits them. If it warps their judgement and corrupts their behaviour, it undeniably gives them an already tarnished but still likeable grace.
They make us feel, and even delight in all the ease and mellowness that existence can provide in highly refined civilizations. Their perpetual embarkation for a spiritual Cythera* where the feast would be less one for their blunted senses than for their imaginations, their hearts, their minds, their eyes, their nostrils, and their ears, gives a certain voluptuousness to their postures. The most exact portraitists of this period will not show them, I imagine, looking particularly tense or stiff. Their lives spread the sweet perfume of hair that has been let down.
6
Ambition intoxicates more than fame; desire makes all things blossom, and possession makes them wither away; it is better to dream your life than to live it, even though living it is still dreaming it, albeit less mysteriously and less clearly, in a dark, heavy dream, like the dream diffused through the dim awareness of ruminating beasts. Shakespeare’s plays are more beautiful when viewed in a study than when put on in the theatre. The poets who have created imperishable women in love have often only ever known humdrum servant girls from taverns, while the most envied voluptuaries are unable to grasp fully the life they lead, or rather the life which leads them.
I knew a young boy of ten, of sickly disposition and precocious imagination, who had developed a purely cerebral love for an older girl. He would stay at his window for hours on end to see her walk by, wept if he didn’t see her, wept even more if he did. He spent moments with her that were very few and far between. He stopped sleeping and eating. One day, he threw himself out of his window. People thought at first that despair at never getting close to his lady friend had filled him with the resolve to die.
They learnt that, on the contrary, he had just had a long conversation with her: she had been extremely nice to him. Then people supposed that he had renounced the insipid days he still had to live, after this intoxication that he might never be able to experience again. Frequent remarks he had previously made to one of his friends finally led people to deduce that he was filled with disappointment every time he saw the sovereign lady of his dreams; but as soon as she had left, his fertile imagination restored all her power to the absent girl, and he would start to long for her again.
Each time, he would try to find an accidental reason for his disappointment in the imperfect nature of the circumstances. After that final interview in which he had, in his already active and inventive fantasy, raised his lady friend to the high perfection of which her nature was capable, and been filled with despair when he compared that imperfect perfection to the absolute perfection on which he lived and from which he was dying, he threw himself out of the window. Subsequently, having been reduced to idiocy, he lived for a long time, since his fall had left him with no memory of his soul, his mind or the words of his lady friend, whom he now met without seeing her. In spite of supplications and threats, she married him, and died several years later, without having managed to make him recognize her. Life is like this girl.
We dream of it, and we love what we have dreamt up.
