United States or North Korea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Thus encouraged and with her voice well warmed, she could not but make a success of the song that was nearer to what would be expected of her in musical comedy. Crossley called out: "Now, the sight singing, Moldini. I don't expect you to do this well, Miss Gower. I simply wish to get an idea of how you'd do a piece we have in rehearsal."
"And it will be two years before I can try grand opera can make my living?" said Mildred slowly. "I did not say that. I said, before you would be great. No, you can sing, I think, in wait." Moldini flung rapidly through an enormous mass of music on a large table. "Ah, here!" he cried, and he showed her a manuscript of scales. "Those two papers. It does not look much?
She felt that the Rivi system and the dirty, obscure little Moldini between them were destroying Mildred by destroying all "temperament" in her. It was the old, old criticism of talent upon genius. Genius has always won in its own time and generation all the world except talent.
"If he did touch it," said she, "how long do you think he would last with me?" Moldini paused half-way in his nod of approval, was stricken with silence and sadness. It would have been natural and proper for a man thus to put sex beneath the career. It was necessary for anyone who developed the strong character that compels success and holds it.
To talent contemporaneous genius, genius seen at its patient, plodding toil, seems coarse and obvious and lacking altogether in inspiration. Talent cannot comprehend that creation is necessarily in travail and in all manner of unloveliness. Mildred toiled on like a slave under the lash, and Moldini and the Rivi system were her twin relentless drivers. She learned to rule herself with an iron hand.
No one left me an income. So, I'm fighting for independence and that means for self-respect. Is self-respect sordid, Cyrilla!" And then Cyrilla understood in part, not altogether. She lived in the ordinary environment of flap-doodle and sweet hypocrisy and sentimentality; and none such can more than vaguely glimpse the realities. Toward the end of the summer Moldini said: "It's over.
Cyrilla looked pained, broke a melancholy silence to say: "I know you don't mean that. You are too intelligent. You sing too well." "Yes, I mean just that," said Mildred. "A living." "At any rate, don't say it. You give such a false impression." "To whom? Not to Crossley, and not to Moldini, and why should I care what any others think? They are not paying my expenses.
She scratched it out and put "occur" in its place. Not that Moldini would have noted the slip; simply that she would not permit herself the satisfaction of the false and self-excusing "happen." It had not been a "happen." It had been a deliberate folly, a lapse to the Mildred she had buried the day she sent Donald Keith away.
She had learned her trade not well enough, for no superior man or woman ever feels that he or she knows the trade well enough but well enough to begin to use it. Said Moldini: "When the great one, who has achieved and arrived, is asked for advice by the sweet, enthusiastic young beginner, what is the answer? Always the same: 'My dear child, don't!
You haven't LIVED it. Cyrilla, I served my apprenticeship at listening to nonsense about careers. I want to have nothing to do with inspiration, and artistic temperament, and spontaneous genius, and all the rest of the lies. Moldini and I know what we are about. So I'm living as those who have succeeded lived and not as those who have failed." Cyrilla was silenced, but not convinced.
Word Of The Day