Page:The Yellow Book - 02.djvu/74

64 tion, zealous indeed, but so indiscriminating as to be vulgar. Like many another man, he had to take "a thrashing from life"; and although he stood up to it unflinchingly, it was only in his death certificate that he acquired passport to fame. Just eighteen years before it was that Bizet had written from Rome: "We are indeed sad, for there come to us the tidings of the death of Ldon Benouville. Really, one works oneself half crazy to gain this Prix de Rome; then comes the huge struggle for position; and after all, perchance to end by dying at thirty-eight! Truly, the picture is the reverse of encouraging." Here was his own destiny, nu comme la main, save that the fates be grudged him even the thirty-eight years of his brother artist—called him when he could not but

But his early life was not unhappy. He had no pitiful struggle with poverty in childhood, at all events. Some tell us he was precocious—terribly so; but I had rather take my cue from his own words, "Je ne me suis donné qu'á contre-couer á la musique," than dwell upon his precocity, real or fictional. It was only hereditarily consistent that he should have a musical organisation. His father was a teacher of music, not without repute; his mother was a sister of Franfois Delsarte, who, although unknown to Grove, has two columns and more devoted to him by Fetis, by whom he is described as an "artiste un peu étrange, quoique d'un mérite incontestable, doué de facultés trés diverses et de toutes les qualités nécessaires á l'enseignement." What there was of music in their son the parents sought to encourage assiduously, and Bizet himself has shown us in his work, more clearly than aught else could, that the true dramatic sense was innate in him. And that Rh