Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/167

152 said to her, “Chopin gives us the Ariel view of the universe.”

Margaret had done her best while in London to see what the English stage had to offer. The result had greatly disappointed her. lu France she found the theatre living, and found also a public which would not have tolerated "one touch of that stage-strut and vulgar bombast of tone which the English actor fancies indispensable to scenic illusion."

In Paris she says that she saw, for the first time, something represented in a style 'uniformly good.” Besides this general excellence, which is still aimed at in the best theatres of the Continent, the Parisian stage had then a star of the first magnitude, whose splendour was, without an equal, and whose setting brought to successor. In the supreme domain of tragic art, Rachel then reigned, an undisputed queen. Like George Sand, her brilliant front was obscured by the cloud of doubt which rested upon her private character,—a natter of which even the most dissolute age will take note, after its fashion. And yet the charmed barrier of the foot-lights surrounded her with a flame of mystery. Whatever was known or surmised of her elsewhere, within those limits she appeared as the living impersonation of beauty, grace, and power. For Rachel had, at this time, no public sorrow. How it might fare with her and her lovers little concerned the crowds who gathered nightly, drawn by the lightnings of her eye, the melodious thunder of her voice. Ten years later, a new favourite, her rival but not her equal, came to win the heart of her Pariş from her. Thew-Rachel, grieved and angry, knew the vanity of all human dependence. She crossed the ocean, and gave the New World a new delight. But in spite of