38
PARTISAN REVIEW
to for help but not a personal man whom you appealed to for love,
sympathy, understanding? He was not, nor was anyone in his gen–
eration- like whoever in our generation has the least public author–
ity-a parent-counselor-doctor-teacher and general nursemaid.
J.
B. departs; we have both been much relaxed by this patting
of each other's iron heads. After I have got dinner and seen J. to
bed I play some records, the Toscanini recordings from
Romeo and
Juliet.
Not the least of my debts to
J.
B. is my introduction to Berlioz
- the Romeo and Juliet music, especially the
"Scene d'Amour,"
is
almost my favorite music ; certainly it is my favorite sexual music.
Wagner perhaps suggests a freer sensuality, if by sensuality we mean
what it means in early youth- sex without the emotions of sex.
Berlioz is the sensuality of maturity, when everything we have thought
and felt feeds the blood-stream. When I finish the Berlioz I look
around for something I can bear to hear after it. Only Gluck's
Grphee
will do. The music-promoters talk of music as uniting
people-maybe it does, as any shared experience unites. But I know
nothing
essentially
lonelier than a great musical experience, telling
us of death while we are yet so alive.
In
Grphee
the search begun
in the joy of Juliet's youth and carried to the tomb continues into
eternity.
It
is no paradox, then, that Gluck's emotions are easier to
sustain than those of Berlioz'
"Scene d'Amour"
which confronts an
endless capacity for feeling with the finiteness of life.
I try, later, to say something of this to
L.
and I add, "Literature
can never do what music does." This is supremely tactless, addressed
to a literary man, and I see he is annoyed, as if I had accused him
and all lovers of literature of an emotional deficiency. But I never–
theless persist, that music takes us where the written word can never
reach even when it is most music.
