Page:The Yellow Book - 02.djvu/78

68 bound, aghast as it were; I have not eyes, ears, intelligence, enough even to admire. But when I see 'L' Ecole D'Athenes', or 'La Vierge de Foligno', when I hear 'Les Noces de Figaro', or the second act of 'Guillaume Tell', I am completely happy; I experience a sense of comfort, a complete satisfaction: in effect, I forget everything."

This, then, is what Rome did for Bizet; but, be it said, for Bizet très jeune encore. For a time the result is patent in his work, but afterwards there comes, although no revulsion, a distinct variation of feeling, which has in it something of compromise. The genius innate in him was inspirational before it was if it ever was erudite. Even in his later days there was for him no cowering before his culture. In 1867 he wrote in the Revue Natlonale—the only critique, by the way, he ever wrote—under the pseudonym of Gaston de Betzi: "The artist has no name, no nationality. He is inspired or he is not. He has genius or he has not. If he has, we welcome him; if he has not, we can at most respect him, if we do not pity and forget him."

He was the same in all things: "I have no comrades," he said, "only friends." And there is one sentence that he wrote from Rome that might well be held up to the gamins of the French Conservatoire. "Je ne veux rien faire de chic; je veux avoir des idlèes avant de commencer un morceau."

In August of his second year Bizet left Rome on a visit to Naples. He carried a letter to Mercadente. On his return good news and bad awaited him. Ernest Guiraud, his good friend and quondam fellow-student in the class of Marmontel, has just been proclaimed Prix de Rome. And this at the very moment Bizet was to leave the Villa; for the Academy would have it that their musical pensionnaires should pass the third year in Germany. The prospect was entirely repugnant to Bizet. So he went to Rh