Already we can single out a few of them. The time is coming when
music-lovers will never make a pilgrimage to the resting-place of
Wagner without making another to the grave of Mathilde Wesendonk,
whose "virtue" breathed into "Tristan and Isolde" the breath of life.
We shall not much longer neglect the tomb of Charles Darwin's father,
who, by making the evolutionist financially independent, gave his
services to the world. Nor shall we disregard the memory of that other
Charles-Darwin-by-proxy--his wife. For her tireless comradeship and
devotion and freely lavished vitality were an indispensable reservoir
of strength to the great invalid. Without it the world would never
have had the "Origin of Species" or the "Descent of Man."
Other instances throng to mind. I have small doubt that Charles Eliot
Norton was the silent partner of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Lowell; Ste.
Clare of Francis of Assisi; Joachim and Billroth of Brahms, and
Dorothy Wordsworth of William. By a pleasant coincidence, I had no
sooner noted down the last of these names than I came upon this
sentence in Sarah Orne Jewett's Letters: "How much that we call
Wordsworth himself was Dorothy to begin with." And soon after, I found
these words in a letter which Brahms sent Joachim with the score of
his second "Serenade": "Care for the piece a little, dear friend; it
is very much yours and sounds of you. Whence comes it, anyway, that
music sounds so friendly, if it is not the doing of the one or two
people whom one loves as I love you?" The impressionable Charles Lamb
must have had many such partners besides his sister Mary. Hazlitt
wrote: "He is one of those of whom it may be said, 'Tell me your
company, and I'll tell you your manners.' He is the creature of
sympathy, and makes good whatever opinion you seem to entertain of
him."
Perhaps the most creative master by proxy I have ever known was the
wife of one of our ex-Presidents. To call upon her was to experience
the elevation and mental unlimbering of three or four glasses of
champagne, with none of that liquid's less desirable after-effects. I
should not wonder if her eminent husband's success were not due as
much to her creativeness as to his own.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account