d to virtue or to vice. This
is the point of Cherubino, that the ethical capacities in him are
still potential. His passion still hovers on the borderland of good
and bad. And this undetermined passion is beautiful because of extreme
freshness; of infinite, immeasurable expansibility. Cherubino is the
epitome of all that belongs to the amorous temperament in a state of
still ascendant adolescence. He is about sixteen years of age--a boy
yesterday, a man to-morrow--to-day both and neither--something
beyond boyhood, but not yet limited by man's responsibility and man's
absorbing passions. He partakes of both ages in the primal awakening
to self-consciousness. Desire, which in Don Juan has become a fiend,
hovers before him like a fairy. His are the sixteen years, not of a
Northern climate, but of Spain or Italy, where manhood appears in a
flash, and overtakes the child with sudden sunrise of new faculties.
_Nondum amabam, sed amare amabam, quaerebam quod amarem, amans
amare_--'I loved not yet, but was in love with loving; I sought
what I should love, being in love with loving.' That sentence, penned
by S. Augustine and consecrated by Shelley, describes the mood of
Cherubino. He loves at every moment of his life, with every pulse of
his being. His object is not a beloved being, but love itself--the
satisfaction of an irresistible desire, the paradise of bliss which
merely loving has become for him. What love means he hardly knows. He
only knows that he must love. And women love him--half as a plaything
to be trifled with, half as a young god to be wounded by. This rising
of the star of love as it ascends into the heaven of youthful fancy,
is revealed in the melodies Mozart has written for him. How shall we
describe their potency? Who shall translate those curiously perfect
words to which tone and rhythm have been indissolubly wedded? _E
pur mi piace languir cosi.... E se non ho chi m' oda, parlo d'amor con
me._

But if this be so, it may be asked, Who shall be found worthy to act
Cherubino on the stage? You cannot have seen and heard Pauline Lucca,
or you would not ask this question.

Cherubino is by no means the most important person in the plot of the
_Nozze_. But he strikes the keynote of the opera. His love is the
standard by which we measure the sad, retrospective, stately love of
the Countess, who tries to win back an alienated husband. By Cherubino
we measure the libertine love of the Count, who is a kind of Don Ju