The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 56, June, 1862

Working constantly for so many years, she had yet known nothing of her readers, had felt her literary life to be an utter failure, had thrown a voice into the world and heard no echo; and when for the first time told of the admiration she elicited in this country and of one who rejoiced in her, her face kindled and she desired to come and be among her own people. Those who have failed to appreciate her can hardly be blamed, as it is owing entirely to their deficiency; but the cavillers—those who have ears and hear not—are less excusable. Almost a recluse,—declining even an interview with her publishers,—in ill-health, in poverty, and with waning youth, she poured out her precious ointment from alabaster boxes, and there were not wanting Pharisees. But hampered by precedent and somewhat barren of enthusiasms as are almost all productions now, how could we do aught but welcome this spontaneous and ever-fresh fountain bubbling into the sunlight, albeit without geometrical restrictions, and bringing as it did such treasures from its secret sources? Yet, welcomed or not, there is no record of any female prose-writer's ever having lived who possessed more than a portion of that genius which permeated Elizabeth Sheppard's whole being. Genius,—the very word expresses her: in harmony with the great undertone of the universe, the soul suffused with light. Flower-warmth and fragrance are on her page, the soft low summer wind seems to be speaking with you as you read, her characters are like the stars impersonated, and still, however lofty her nature, always and forever genial. You catch her own idiosyncrasy throughout, and believe, that, like Evelyn Hope, she was made of spirit, fire, and dew. When we remember the very slight effect ever visible to her of all her labor, there is something sad in the thought of this young soul, thrilled with its own fervors and buoyant in anticipation, sending forth the first venture. But then we recognize as well, that she was one of those few to whom creation is a necessity, that in truth she scarcely needed human response, and that when men were silent God replied.

Miss Sheppard's style was something very novel. Based, perhaps, on an admiration of one whose later exploits have dwarfed his earlier in the general estimation, there was yet no more resemblance than between the string-courses of a building and its sculptured friezes. Indeed, writing was not her virtual expression: this may be learned even in her peculiar way of loving Nature, for it was not so much Nature itself as Nature's effects that she prized; and between the work now performed and that awaiting her in some further life one feels the difference that exists between the soft clay model with its mild majesty, its power clogged and covered, and the same when it issues in the white radiance of marble. She does not seem to have been an extensive reader, and certainly no student, while she totally disregarded all rules and revision. Her sentences were so long that one got lost in them, and had finally to go back and clutch a nominative case and drag it down the page with him; there were ambiguities and obscurities in plenty: her thoughts were so bright that they darkened her words; one must go through a process of initiation,—but having mastered the style, one knew the writer. It was well worth while, this shrouding rhetoric, for beneath it were no reserves; superficially no one ever kept more out of sight, but the real reader could not fail to know that here he had the freedom of the author's nature: and although she somewhere said that a woman "thus intensely feminine, thus proud and modest, betraying herself to the world in her writings, is an exception, and one in the whole world the most rare," she knew not that she sketched herself in that exception. But there are not elsewhere to be found pages so drenched with beauty as hers; and for all her vague abstractions of language, and wide, suffused effects, she possessed yet the skill to present a picture, keenly etched and vividly colored, in the fewest words, when she chose. Not to mention Rose and Bernard, who, oddly enough, are a series of the most exquisite pictures in themselves, bathed in changing and ever-living light, let us take, for instance, Maria Cerinthia walking in the streets of Paris, having worn out her mantilla, and with only a wreath of ivy on her head,—or Clotilda at her books, "looking very much like an old picture of a young person sitting there,"—or the charming one of Laura's pas, which the little boy afterwards describes in saying, "She quite swam, and turned her eyes upward,"—or, better, yet, that portrait of a Romagnese woman: "of the ancient Roman beauty, rare now, if still remembered, with hair to her knees, wrapping her form in a veil vivid as woven gold, with the emerald eyes of Dante's Beatrice, a skin of yellow whiteness, and that mould of figure in which undulating softness quenches majesty,—the mould of the mystical Lucretia." There are sea-sketches scattered among these leaves which no painter's brush will ever equal, and morning and twilight gain new splendor and tenderness beneath her touch.

But, after all, this was not her style's chief excellence; she cared little for such pictorial achievements, and in presenting her fancies she often sacrificed outline to melody; it is necessary for you to feel rather than to see her meaning. What distinguished her yet more was the ability by means of this style to interpret music into words. Although this may not be correct practice, there was never a musical critic who did not now and then attempt it: musicians themselves never do, because music is to them nothing to see or to describe, but the air they breathe, and in fact a state of being. Do you remember that tone-wreath of heather and honeysuckle? "It was a movement of such intense meaning that it was but one sigh of unblended and unfaltering melody isolated as the fragrance of a single flower, and only the perfumes of Nature exhale a bliss as sweet, how far more unexpressed! This short movement, that in its oneness was complete, grew, as it were, by fragmentary harmonies, intricate, but most gradual, into another,—a prestissimo so delicately fitful that it was like moonlight dancing upon crested ripples; or, for a better similitude, like quivering sprays in a summer wind. And in less than fifty bars of regularly broken time—how ravishingly sweet I say not—the first subject in refrain flowed through the second, and they, interwoven even as creepers and flowers densely tangled, closed together simultaneously." And if you have not the book by you, will you pardon another,—the awful and eternal flow of the Mer de Glace?

"At first awoke the strange, smooth wind-notes of the opening adagio; the fetterless chains of ice seemed to close around my heart. The movement had no blandness in its solemnity; and so still and shiftless was the grouping of the harmonies, that a frigidity, actual as well as ideal, passed over my pores and hushed my pulses. After a hundred such tense yet clinging chords, the sustaining calm was illustrated, not broken, by a serpentine phrase of one lone oboë, pianissimo over the piano-surface, which it crisped not, but on and above which it breathed like the track of a sunbeam aslant from a parted cloud. The slightest possible retardation at its close brought us to the refrain of the simple adagio, interrupted again by a rush of violoncello-notes, rapid and low, like some sudden under-current striving to burst through the frozen sweetness. Then spread wide the subject, as plains upon plains of water-land; though the time was gradually increased. Amplifications of the same harmonies introduced a fresh accession of violoncelli and oboi contrasted artfully in syncopation, till at length the strides of the accelerando gave a glittering precipitation to the entrance of the second and longest movement.

"Then Anastase turned upon me, and with the first bar we fell into a tumultuous presto. Far beyond all power to analyze as it was just then, the complete idea embraced me as instantaneously as had the picturesque chillness of the first. I have called it tumultuous,—but merely in respect of rhythm:—the harmonies were as clear and evolved as the modulation itself was sharp, keen, and unapproachable. Through every bar reigned that vividly enunciated ideal, whose expression pertains to the one will alone in any age,—the ideal, that, binding together in suggestive imagery every form of beauty, symbolizes and represents something beyond them all.

"Here over the surge-like, but fast-bound motivo—only like those tost ice-waves, dead still in their heaped-up crests—were certain swelling crescendos of a second subject, so unutterably if vaguely sweet, that the souls of all deep blue Alp-flowers, the clarity of all high blue skies, had surely passed into them, and was passing from them again….

"It was not until the very submerging climax that the playing of Anastase was recalled to me. Then, amidst long ringing notes of the wild horns, and intermittent sighs of the milder wood, swept from the violins a torrent of coruscant arpeggi, and above them all I heard his tone, keen but solvent, as his bow seemed to divide the very strings with fire, and I felt as if some spark had fallen upon my fingers to kindle mine. As soon as it was over, I looked up and laughed in his face with sheer pleasure."

Nothing of the kind was ever half so delightful, if one excepts Mr. Dwight's translation of a Gondel-lied. As literal description it is wondrous, but as imagination it equals the music itself. Let us pause for an instant here and recall the singular inventive and combining grace with which a Spectacle is always given in these stories. It is well known that Mendelssohn contemplated an opera upon the "Tempest," although he did not live to execute the idea; but how charmingly is that taken and mingled with what he had already done in the "Midsummer-Night's Dream," at the festival of the Silver Wedding, when the lonely tones from age to age frozen on the cups of lilies, the orbed harmonies bound burning within the roses, the dreaming song thrilled along the veins of violets, intricate sounds hushed under green gloom of myrtle-leaves, mourning chords with which the cedars stood charged,—were all disenchanted and stole forth on longing wind-instruments and on the splendor of violins, "accumulating in orchestral richness, as if flower after flower of music were unsheathing to the sun"!

Yet the unlovely is not to be found within these covers: there was a quality in the writer's mind like that fervid, all-vivifying sunshine which so illumines the cities of the desert, so steeps the pavements, so soaks through the pores of solids, so sharpens angles and softens curves, as Fromentin tells us, that even squalor borrows brilliant dyes, and rags and filth lighten into picturesque and burnished glory. And this is well for the reader, as all have not time for philosophy, nor can all transmute pain into treasure. But for her, sweet sounds and sights abound in everything; bird and breeze and bee alike are winged with melody; the music of the sea satisfies her heart, and there "the artist-ear,—which makes a spectrum for all sounds that are not separate, distinguishes the self-same harmonies that govern the gradations of the orchestra, from deep to deep descending, until sounds are lost in sound as lights in light";—the trains have their thunderous music in her hearing; and the bells to which Cecilia listens seem to be ringing in the last day:—"The ravishing and awful sound of them, which is only heard by the few,—the passion in their rise and fall,—their wavering,—their rushing fulness,—drew off all consciousness: most like the latest and last passion,—the passion of death."

There seems to be no subject which this woman has not pondered deeply. Her theory of Temperament is an attendant fairy that does marvellous things for her, and not only apportions natures, but corresponding bodies, so that we can easily see how the golden age is to return again, when peradventure deceits shall be impossible, and all the virtues thrive by mere necessity under the reign of this perfected Science of the Soul. Yet, roam where she would, there were always two mysteries that allured her back again, as Thoné's curt sentence told,—"Tonkunst und Arzenei"; and to these might be added Race, in defiance of Mr. Buckle. Assuredly the Hebrew owes acknowledgment to her, and not George Borrow, with all his weird learning, enters more deeply into the Burden of Egypt; Browning's appreciation of the gypsy standing alone beside hers,—Browning, between whose writings and her own a rich sympathy exists, both being so possessed of fulness. Yet verse could not chain her wide eloquence in its fetters; and whenever she attempted it, its music made her thought shapeless. There is one exception to this, however, and we give it below,—for, inartistic as this mould may seem, and amorphous as its ideas may be, it is the only instance of any rhymes fully translating the meaning of music, and it is as full of clinging pathos and melody as the great creation it paraphrases, and to which no words will quite respond.

  "In gardens where the languid roses keep  Perpetual sweetness for the hearts that smile,  Perpetual sadness for the hearts that weep,  Lonely, unseen, I wander, to beguile  The day that only shines to show thee bright,  The night whose stars burn wan beside thy light,    Adelaïda!  "Adelaïda! all the birds are singing  Low, as thou passest, where in leaves they lie;  With timid chirp unto their soft mates clinging,  They greet that presence without which they die,—  Die, even with Nature's universal heart,  When thou, her queen, dost in thy pride depart,    Adelaïda!  "Depart! and dim her beauty evermore;  Go, from the shivering leaves and lily-flowers,  That, white as saints on the eternal shore,  Stand wavering, beckoning, in the moony bowers,—  Beckon me on where their moist feet are laid  In the dark mould, fast by the alder-shade,    Adelaïda!  "Adelaïda! 'tis the Grave or Love  Must fight for this great first, last mastery.  I feed in faith on spicy gales above,  Where all along that blue unchanging sky  Thy name is traced;—its sweetness never fails  To sound in streams of peace in spicy gales,    Adelaïda!  "Adelaïda! woe is me, woe, woe!  Not only in the sky, in starry gold,  I see thy name,—where peaceful rivers flow,  Not only hear its sweetness manifold;  On every white and purple flower 'tis written,  Its echo every aspen-quake hath smitten,    Adelaïda!  "Go farther! let me leave thee! I depart!—  Who whispered I would linger by thy side?  Who said it beat so warm, my feeble heart?  Who told, I dared to claim thee as my bride?  Who cried, I roamed without thee all the day  And clasped thee in my dreams? Away, away,    Adelaïda!  "I die, but thou shall live; in the loud noon  Thy feet shall crush the long grass o'er my head,  Not rudely, rudely,—gently, gently, soon  Shall tread me heavier down in that dark bed;  And thou shalt know not on whose head they pass,  Whose silent hands, whose frozen heart!—Alas,    Adelaïda!"

There are those who in "Charles Auchester," charmed by the simplicity and truth of that first part called "Choral Life," objected to the rest on the score of extravagance. But this book records the adoration of music, and in an age replete with the dilettanti of indifference may we not thank God for one enthusiast? Yet, indeed, everything about Mendelssohn was itself extravagant,—his childhood, his youth, his life, his beauty, his power: should the instrument, then, be tuned lower than such key-note? And again, to us who live a somewhat commonplace routine, the life of musical artists, especially abroad, must necessarily seem redundant; yet it is only that life, natural and actual, into which we are here inducted. The same is possible to no other class of artists: even the scholar, buried in his profound studies, must descend from his abstraction; the poet, the painter, cannot share it: for the latter, however much he clubs and cliques, is seldom sufficiently dispossessed of himself; and the other, though he strike out of his heat poems as immortal as stars, may yet live among clods and feel no thrill returning on himself. But the musician cannot dwell alone: his art requires that he should cluster, and the orchestra enforces it; therefore he acts and reacts like the vibrations ridged within a Stradivarius, he is kept in his art's atmosphere till it becomes his life, its aura bathes every trivial thing, and existence which might otherwise be meagre is raised and glorified. Thus yet more, when we recall that even were the musician's life not so, still it ought to be, and it is the right of the author to idealize, one can believe "Charles Auchester" to be but a faithful transcript. "In proportion to our appreciation of music is also our appreciation of what is not music," Sarona says; and so faithfully does this writer prove it, by her attention to minute and usual circumstances, that one might certainly allow her some exaltation when touching on one theme,—yet how this exaltation can be called in question by any who espouse Bettine von Arnim's sublime ravings the morning after entering Vienna is mysterious. Were the real condition of these natures—which certainly exist—bared to view, many from their phlegmatic experience might deem all the nerves to be in a state of excitation, when in fact they saw only normal and healthy play. It is true that the power of modulated tones arouses everything most ethereal and lofty in our composition, and it must therefore be wrong to charge with extravagance any description of a life in music, which is a life in the highest, because truly it cannot be extravagant enough, since all words fail before that of which it discourses,—while it gives you the sense of the universe and of the eternities, and is to the other arts what the soul is to the body. And is it not, moreover, the voice of Nature, the murmur of wind and tree, the thrill of all the dropping influences of the heavens, the medium of spiritual communication, the universal language in which all can exchange thought and feeling, and through which the whole world becomes one nation? Out of the spirit blossom spirits, Bettine tells us, and we subject ourselves to their power: "Ah, wonderful mediation of the ineffable, which oppresses the bosom! Ah, music!" To go further, there is certainly no exaggeration in Charles Auchester's treatment of his hero; for, reading the contemporaneous articles of musical journals, you will find them one and all speaking in even more unrestrained profligacy of praise, recognizing in the cloud of composers but nine worthy the name of Master, of whom Mendelssohn was one, and declaring that under his baton the orchestra was electrified. We all remember the solemnly pathetic and passionate beauty of Seraphael's burial by night, with the music winding up among the stars; but did it in reality exceed the actual progress of the dead Master's ashes from city to city, met in the twilight and the evening by music, gray-headed Capellmeisters receiving him with singing in the open midnight, and fresh songs being flung upon his coffin like wreaths with the sunrise?

There is a wonderful strength exhibited in the sketch of Seraphael from first to last: not to mention the happiness of the name, of which this is by no means a single instance, and the fact of his having no pramomen, both of which so insignificant atoms in themselves lift him at once a line above the level in the reader's sympathy,—it was a most difficult thing to present such delicacy and lightness, and yet to preserve "the awful greatness of his lonely genius," as somewhere else she calls it; but all must confess that it is done, and perfectly. It is not alone in Seraphael that this strength is shown; a new mould of character in fiction is given us,—masculine characters which, though light and airy, are yet brilliant and strong, most sweet, and surcharged with loveliness. It is this perfect sweetness that constitutes half the charm of her books,—for in the only one where it is deficient, "Beatrice Reynolds," the whole fails. One feels sure that it was never deficient in herself, that her own heart must have been overflowing with warm and cordial tenderness,—and if any testimony were wanting, we should have it in her evident love of children. It is only by love that understanding comes, and no one ever understood children better or painted them half so well: they are no mites of puny perfection, no angels astray, no Psyches in all the agonies of the bursting chrysalis, but real little flesh-and-blood people in pinafores, approached by nobody's hand so nearly as George Eliot's. They are flawless: the boy who, having swung himself giddy, felt "the world turning round, as papa says it does, nurse,"—the other boy, who, immured in studies and dreams, found all life to be "a fairy-tale book with half the leaves uncut,"—the charming little snow-drop of a Carlotta, "who would sit next him, would stick her tiny fork into his face, with a morsel of turkey at the end of it, would poke crumbs into his mouth with her finger, would put up her lips to kiss him, would say, every moment, 'I like you much,—much!' with all Davy's earnestness, though with just so much of her mother's modesty as made her turn pink and shy, and put herself completely over the chair into Seraphael's lap when we laughed at her." And Philippa, and Philippa's conversation, capers, and cat! an impossibility to those who have never experienced her whirlwinds of exuberance,—and to those who have, a reproduction of the drollest days of their existence. Never was there a personage so perfectly drawn, never such a grotesque storm of noisy health,—the matchless Philippa! After reading Miss Sheppard's juveniles, you feel that you have been in most good and innocent company all day; and since it is necessary for an author to become for the moment that nature of which he writes, this author must have been something very good and innocent in herself in order to uphold this strain so long. Of those accessible, the best is that entitled, "Round the Fire,"—a series of tales purporting to be told by little girls, and each of extraordinary interest; but the one she herself preferred is yet with four others in the hands of an Edinburgh publisher, and perhaps yet in manuscript,—the name of this being "Prince Gentil, Prince Joujou, and Prince Bonbon, or the Children's Cities." This reminds one that cities, in the abstract, seem to have been with her a subject of unceasing wonder and pleasure,—from Venice, with its shadowy, slippery, silent water-ways to X, that ideal city of the North; and where is there anything to excel the Picture of Paris, drawn minutely and colored, his prison-prophecy, Paris as it was to be created, rather than restored, by Louis Napoleon? "Then he took from his pocket a strong magnifying-glass, and put it gently into Rodomant's hand. Rodomant grasped it, and through it gazed long and eagerly. And from that hieroglyphic mist there started, sudden and distinct as morn without a cloud, a brilliant bird's-eye view of a superb and stupendous city, a dream of imaginative architecture, almost in itself a poem. Each house of each street, each lamp and fountain, each line of road and pavement, marked as vividly as the glorious domes, the pointing pillars, grand gates and arches, proud palaces in inclosures of solemn leafage, the bridges traced like webs of shadow, the stately terraces and dim cathedrals. Green groves and avenues and vivid gardens interlaced and divided the city within the walls; and without, masses of delicate shrubbery, as perfectly defined, were studded with fair villas of every varied form, melting gradually and peacefully, as it seemed, to a bright champaign embroidered with fence and hedge-row…. A sort of visionary pageant unrolled to him, partly memorial, in part prophetic. He knew he had seen something like it,—but when and where? What planet boasted that star of cities for strength and lustre that must surpass new London and old Thebes? For Rodomant had the mathematical gift of all the highest harmonists, and his brain could magnify and actualize the elfin-sized images under his eye to their just and proper proportion in the real." It must have been like heaven, this city so stilly and so fair,—for, you see, there were no people there.

Miss Sheppard's plots are not conspicuous, for her characters make circumstance and are their own fate; still her capacity in that line is finely exhibited by the plot of the opera of "Alarcos." In mere filling up, having excepted the incident,—always original and delightful,—the lofty imagination, and the descriptions of wind and weather,—one of her best points will be found to be costume, a minor thing, but then there are few who excel in modern millinery. "Salome was beautiful. Her splendid delicate dress, all rosy folds, skirt over skirt of drapery falling softly into each other, made her clear skin dazzle in the midst of them; and the masses of vivid geraniums here and there without their leaves were not too gorgeous for her bearing,—nor for her hair, in whose rich darkness geraniums also glowed, long wreaths curling down into her neck." Rose in white, with wreaths of rubies weighing down her slender arms;—Adelaïda, with her lace robe like woven light on satin like woven moon-beams, and large water-lilies in her golden hair;—my Lady Barres, whose dress "consisted almost always of levantine, with demi-train and under-petticoat of white brocaded silk peeping through its open front; the hair showing the shape of the head, and confined by a narrow band of black velvet across the brow, fastened in the morning with onyx or agate, in the evening with a brilliant only; she always wore upon her wrists delicate bands of cambric embroidered with seed-pearl so minutely that it seemed a pattern wrought out of the threads of the stuff, and little pearl tassels drooped there scarcely eclipsing her hands in fairness."