In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Read Free Page B

wish to see any storms except on
those coasts where they raged with most violence, so I should not have
cared to hear the great actress except in one of those classic parts
in which Swann had told me that she touched the sublime. For when it
is in the hope of making a priceless discovery that we desire to
receive certain impressions from nature or from works of art, we have
certain scruples about allowing our soul to gather, instead of these,
other, inferior, impressions, which are liable to make us form a false
estimate of the value of Beauty. Berma in Andromaque , in Les
Caprices de Marianne , in Phèdre , was one of those famous spectacles
which my imagination had so long desired. I should enjoy the same
rapture as on the day when in a gondola I glided to the foot of the
Titian of the Frari or the Carpaccios of San Giorgio dei Schiavoni,
were I ever to hear Berma repeat the lines beginning,
"On dit qu'un prompt départ vous éloigne de nous,
Seigneur,——"
    I was familiar with them from the simple reproduction in black and
white which was given of them upon the printed page; but my heart beat
furiously at the thought—as of the realisation of a long–planned
voyage—that I should at length behold them, bathed and brought to
life in the atmosphere and sunshine of the voice of gold. A Carpaccio
in Venice, Berma in Phèdre , masterpieces of pictorial or dramatic art
which the glamour, the dignity attaching to them made so living to me,
that is to say so indivisible, that if I had been taken to see
Carpaccios in one of the galleries of the Louvre, or Berma in some
piece of which I had never heard, I should not have experienced the
same delicious amazement at finding myself at length, with wide–open
eyes, before the unique and inconceivable object of so many thousand
dreams. Then, while I waited, expecting to derive from Berma's playing
the revelation of certain aspects of nobility and tragic grief, it
would seem to me that whatever greatness, whatever truth there might
be in her playing must be enhanced if the actress imposed it upon a
work of real value, instead of what would, after all, be but
embroidering a pattern of truth and beauty upon a commonplace and
vulgar web.
    Finally, if I went to hear Berma in a new piece, it would not be easy
for me to judge of her art, of her diction, since I should not be able
to differentiate between a text which was not already familiar and
what she added to it by her intonations and gestures, an addition
which would seem to me to be embodied in the play itself; whereas the
old plays, the classics which I knew by heart, presented themselves to
me as vast and empty walls, reserved and made ready for my inspection,
on which I should be able to appreciate without restriction the
devices by which Berma would cover them, as with frescoes, with the
perpetually fresh treasures of her inspiration. Unfortunately, for
some years now, since she had retired from the great theatres, to make
the fortune of one on the boulevards where she was the 'star,' she had
ceased to appear in classic parts; and in vain did I scan the
hoardings; they never advertised any but the newest pieces, written
specially for her by authors in fashion at the moment. When, one
morning, as I stood searching the column of announcements to find the
afternoon performances for the week of the New Year holidays, I saw
there for the first time—at the foot of the bill, after some probably
insignificant curtain–raiser, whose title was opaque to me because it
had latent in it all the details of an action of which I was
ignorant—two acts of Phèdre with Mme. Berma, and, on the following
afternoons, Le Demi–Monde , Les Caprices de Marianne , names which,
like that of Phèdre , were for me transparent, filled with light
only, so familiar were those works to me, illuminated to their very
depths by the revealing smile of art. They seemed to me to invest with
a fresh nobility Mme. Berma herself when I read in the newspapers,
after