[2] I should be inclined to attribute to this nervous sympathy the prodigious and incomprehensible effect of fashionable music. (Sympathy at Dresden for Rossini, 1821.) As soon as it is out of fashion, it becomes no worse for that, and yet it ceases to have any effect upon perfectly ingenuous girls. Perhaps it used to please them, as also stimulating young men to fervour. Madame de Sévigné says to her daughter (Letter 202, May 6, 1672): "Lully surpassed himself in his royal music; that beautiful _Miserere_ was still further enlarged: there was a _Libera_ at which all eyes were full of tears." It is as impossible to doubt the truth of this effect, as to refuse wit or refinement to Madame de Sévigné. Lully's music, which charmed her, would make us run away at present; in her day, his music encouraged crystallisation--it makes it impossible in ours. [Pg 59] CHAPTER XIX LIMITATIONS OF BEAUTY--(_continued_) A woman of quick fancy and tender heart, but timid and cautious in her sensibility, who the day after she appears in society, passes in review a thousand times nervously and painfully all that she may have said or given hint of--such a woman, I say, grows easily used to want of beauty in a man: it is hardly an obstacle in rousing her affection. It is really on the same principle that you care next to nothing for the degree of beauty in a mistress, whom you adore and who repays you with harshness. You have very nearly stopped crystallising her beauty, and when your _friend in need_ tells you that she isn't pretty, you are almost ready to agree. Then he thinks he has made great way. My friend, brave Captain Trab, described to me this evening his feelings on seeing Mirabeau once upon a time. No one looking upon that great man felt a disagreeable sensation in the eyes--that is to say, found him ugly. People were carried away by his thundering words; they fixed their attention, they delighted in fixing their attention, only on what was beautiful in his face. As he had practically no beautiful features (in the sense of sculpturesque or picturesque beauty) they minded only what beauty he had of another kind, the beauty of expression.[1] [Pg 60] While attention was blind to all traces of ugliness, picturesquely speaking, it fastened on the smallest passable details with fervour--for example, the beauty of his vast head of hair. If he had had horns, people would have thought them lovely.[2]