nctly the longer
we looked, that Cherubino was not in Mozart's work, but merely in
Beaumarchais. A very singular conclusion to arrive at, but one not to
be shirked: Cherubino had passed into the words of Mozart's Italian
libretto, he had passed into the dress, the face, the feature, the
action of the thousands of performers who had sung the "Marriage of
Figaro" on the stage; but he had not passed into Mozart's notes; and
because he had not entered into those notes, that subtle and serious
little Spaniard, who had seen and understood so well the meaning and
beauty of Mozart's music, had known nothing of Cherubino.

Now, after all this discussion respecting his presence and his absence,
let us stay awhile and examine into the being of this Cherubino, so
familiar and so immediately missed by us; let us look at the page, whom
the clever playwright D'Aponte transported, with extraordinary success,
out of the French comedy into the Italian opera text. Very familiar to
all of us, yet, like the things most familiar, rather vaguely; seen
often and in various lights, fluctuating consequently in our memory, as
distinguished from the distinct and steadfast image of things seen only
once and printed off at a stroke on to our mind. At the first glance,
when we see him sitting at the feet of the Countess, singing her his
love songs, he seems a delicate poetic exotic, whose presence takes us
quite aback in the midst of the rouged and pigtailed philosophy, the
stucco and tinsel sentimentality of the French eighteenth century. In
these rooms, all decorated by Boucher and Fragonard, in this society
redolent with the theories of Diderot and the jests of Voltaire, this
page, this boy who is almost a girl, with his ribbons and his ballads,
his blushes, his guitar, and his rapier, appears like a thing of
long past days, or of far distant countries; a belated brother of
Shakspeare's Cesario and Fletcher's Bellario, a straggler from the
Spain of Lope de Vega, who has followed M. Caron de Beaumarchais,
ex-watchmaker and ex-musicmaster to Mesdames the daughters of Louis
XV., from Madrid, and leaped suddenly on to the planks of the Comedie
Francaise ... a ghost of some mediaeval boy page, some little Jehan de
Saintre killed crusading with his lady's name on his lips. Or is not
Cherubino rather a solitary forerunner of romanticism, stumbled untimely
into this France of Marie Antoinette; some elder brother of Goethe's
Mignon ... nay, perhaps Mignon