176 PRÆTERITA-I

203. Still more fortunately it happened that a woman of faultless genius led the following dances,-Taglioni;¹ a person of the highest natural faculties, and stainlessly simple character, gathered with sincerest ardour and reverence into her art. My mother, though she allowed me without serious remonstrance to be taken to the theatre by my father, had the strictest Puritan prejudice against the stage; yet enjoyed it so much that I think she felt the sacrifice she made in not going with us to be a sort of price accepted by the laws of virtue for what was sinful in her concession to my father and me. She went, however, to hear and see this group of players, renowned, without any rivals, through all the cities of Europe;-and, strange and pretty to say, her instinct of the innocence, beauty, and wonder, in every motion of the Grace of her century, was so strong, that from that time forth my mother would always, at a word, go with us to see Taglioni.

Afterwards, a season did not pass without my hearing twice or thrice, at least, those four singers; and I learned the better, because my ear was never jaded, the intention of the music written for them, or studied by them; and am extremely glad now that I heard their renderings of Mozart and Rossini, neither of whom can be now said ever to be heard at all, owing to the detestable quickening of the time. Grisi and Malibran sang at least one-third slower than any modern cantatrice;* and Patti, the last time I heard her, massacred Zerlina’s part in “La ci darem,” as if the audience and she had but the one object of getting Mozart’s air done with, as soon as possible.

204. Afterwards, (the confession may as well be got

*It is a pretty conceit of musical people to call themselves scientific, when they have not yet fixed their unit of time!

¹ [Marie Taglioni, 1809-1884. To like effect Thackeray says in The Newcomes that the young men of that epoch “will never see anything so graceful as Taglioni.” “Once after a lecture,” says Mr. Collingwood, “leading Taglioni to her carriage in the midst of a crowd of onlookers, I saw Ruskin cross the London pavement with an old-world minuet-step, hardly conscious, I am sure, of the quaint homage he was paying to the great dancer he had admired in his boyhood” (Ruskin Relics, p. 142).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]