Daniel Deronda, George Eliot [portable ebook reader .TXT] 📗

becoming bitter to her. Klesmer, preoccupied with a serious purpose, went on without change of tone.

“Now, what sort of issue might be fairly expected from all this self-denial? You would ask that. It is right that your eyes should be open to it. I will tell you truthfully. This issue would be uncertain, and, most probably, would not be worth much.”

At these relentless words Klesmer put out his lip and looked through his spectacles with the air of a monster impenetrable by beauty.

Gwendolen’s eyes began to burn, but the dread of showing weakness urged her to added self-control. She compelled herself to say, in a hard tone,

“You think I want talent, or am too old to begin.”

Klesmer made a sort of hum, and then descended on an emphatic “Yes! The desire and the training should have begun seven years ago⁠—or a good deal earlier. A mountebank’s child who helps her father to earn shillings when she is six years old⁠—a child that inherits a singing throat from a long line of choristers and learns to sing as it learns to talk, has a likelier beginning. Any great achievement in acting or in music grows with the growth. Whenever an artist has been able to say, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered,’ it has been at the end of patient practice. Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline. Singing and acting, like the fine dexterity of the juggler with his cups and balls, require a shaping of the organs toward a finer and finer certainty of effect. Your muscles⁠—your whole frame⁠—must go like a watch, true, true to a hair. That is the work of springtime, before habits have been determined.”

“I did not pretend to genius,” said Gwendolen, still feeling that she might somehow do what Klesmer wanted to represent as impossible. “I only suppose that I might have a little talent⁠—enough to improve.”

“I don’t deny that,” said Klesmer. “If you had been put in the right track some years ago and had worked well you might now have made a public singer, though I don’t think your voice would have counted for much in public. For the stage your personal charms and intelligence might then have told without the present drawback of inexperience⁠—lack of discipline⁠—lack of instruction.”

Certainly Klesmer seemed cruel, but his feeling was the reverse of cruel. Our speech, even when we are most single-minded, can never take its line absolutely from one impulse; but Klesmer’s was, as far as possible, directed by compassion for poor Gwendolen’s ignorant eagerness to enter on a course of which he saw all the miserable details with a definiteness which he could not if he would have conveyed to her mind.

Gwendolen, however, was not convinced. Her self-opinion rallied, and since the counselor whom she had called in gave a decision of such severe peremptoriness, she was tempted to think that his judgment was not only fallible but biased. It occurred to her that a simpler and wiser step for her to have taken would have been to send a letter through the post to the manager of a London theatre, asking him to make an appointment. She would make no further reference to her singing; Klesmer, she saw, had set himself against her singing. But she felt equal to arguing with him about her going on the stage, and she answered in a resistant tone,

“I understood, of course, that no one can be a finished actress at once. It may be impossible to tell beforehand whether I should succeed; but that seems to me a reason why I should try. I should have thought that I might have taken an engagement at a theatre meanwhile, so as to earn money and study at the same time.”

“Can’t be done, my dear Miss Harleth⁠—I speak plainly⁠—it can’t be done. I must clear your mind of these notions which have no more resemblance to reality than a pantomime. Ladies and gentlemen think that when they have made their toilet and drawn on their gloves they are as presentable on the stage as in a drawing-room. No manager thinks that. With all your grace and charm, if you were to present yourself as an aspirant to the stage, a manager would either require you to pay as an amateur for being allowed to perform or he would tell you to go and be taught⁠—trained to bear yourself on the stage, as a horse, however beautiful, must be trained for the circus; to say nothing of that study which would enable you to personate a character consistently, and animate it with the natural language of face, gesture, and tone. For you to get an engagement fit for you straight away is out of the question.”

“I really cannot understand that,” said Gwendolen, rather haughtily⁠—then, checking herself, she added in another tone⁠—“I shall be obliged to you if you will explain how it is that such poor actresses get engaged. I have been to the theatre several times, and I am sure there were actresses who seemed to me to act not at all well and who were quite plain.”

“Ah, my dear Miss Harleth, that is the easy criticism of the buyer. We who buy slippers toss away this pair and the other as clumsy; but there went an apprenticeship to the making of them. Excuse me; you could not at present teach one of those actresses; but there is certainly much that she could teach you. For example, she can pitch her voice so as to be heard: ten to one you could not do it till after many trials. Merely to stand and move on the stage is an art⁠—requires practice. It is understood that we are not now talking of a comparse in a petty theatre who earns the wages of a needlewoman. That is out of the question for you.”

“Of course I must earn more than that,” said Gwendolen, with a sense of wincing rather than of being