of youth
best described as "_les heureux jours ou l'on etait si malheureux!_" It
is an experience worth having to have heard the great singers, but it is
not of the great singers that I wish to speak here. I fancy that it is
with others as with myself, and, in my early days at least, music
wrought its chief enchantments and most perfectly allied itself with
the great world of fantasy and imagination when I heard it in my own
home, or at least quietly and privately, and when its influence was of a
constant and regular kind. Why is it that literature, which enshrines so
much of what is personal and actual and a part of ideal autobiography,
says so little of singers, although the song which moves us, rummaging
among our old memories and, to our surprise and delight, bringing back
clear pictures, is generally linked to the sweet singer who sang it, who
interpreted it for us and made it a part of our imaginative possessions?
Heroines of novels are rarely singers, or, if they sing, abstain from
effective music, and have soft, soothing voices, "as if they only sang
at twilight." Heroines of course have to be heroines and nothing else.
"Soothing, unspeakable charm of gentle womanhood," wrote George Eliot,
"which supersedes all acquisitions, all accomplishments. You would never
have asked at any period of Mrs. Amos Barton's life if she sketched or
played the piano. You would perhaps have been rather scandalized if she
had descended from the serene dignity of _being_ to the assiduous unrest
of _doing_." However, when he recalls the female singers he has known,
any man will grant that they have been almost without exception very
charming women. A really good singer must possess in absolute equipoise
ardor and calm. But the first singer I ever heard who made me feel
upborne by the music and floated as by the sweep of wings was a man with
a high, melancholy, piercingly sweet tenor voice. He had a pale,
striking face, with a mobile mouth, intensely brilliant blue eyes, a
lofty forehead, and his fine, scanty brown hair hung low on his neck. As
he sang with lifted head and eyes which gazed steadfastly before him, he
seemed rapt and inspired. Were I to paint an angel I should try to seize
his lineaments and the glory shining on his pale face. The song I loved
best to hear him sing was Schubert's "Erl-King," which thrilled me with
a sense of terror and mystery and made me tremble like a harp-string in
response to his piercingly clear tone