Maurice Guest | Page 5

other people crossed it, on
their way to the woods that lay on the further side, but soon the last
stragglers vanished, and he was alone.
As he looked about, eager to discover beauty in the strip of landscape
that stretched before him--the line of water, its banks of leafless
trees--he was instinctively filled with a desire for something grander,
for a feature in the scene that would answer to his mood. There, where
the water appeared to end in a clump of trees, there, should be
mountains, a gently undulating line, blue with the unapproachable blue
of distance, and high enough to form a background to the view; in
sumer, heavy with haze, melting into the sky; in winter, lined and
edged with snow. From this, his thoughts sprang back to the music he
had heard that morning. All the vague yet eager hopes that had run riot
in his brain, for months past, seemed to have been summed up and
made clear to him, in one supreme phrase of it, a great phrase in C
major, in the concluding movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
First sounded by the shrill sweet winds, it had suddenly been given out
by the strings, in magnificient unison, and had mounted up and on, to
the jubilant trilling of the little flutes. There was such a courageous
sincerity in this theme, such undauntable resolve; it expressed more
plainly than words what he intended his life of the next few years to be;
for he was full to the brim of ambitious intentions, which he had never
yet had a chance of putting into practice. He felt so ready for work, so
fresh and unworn; the fervour of a deep enthusiasm was rampant in him.

What a single-minded devotion to art, he promised himself his should
be! No other fancy or interest should share his heart with it, he vowed
that to himself this day, when he stood for the first time on historic
ground, where the famous musicians of the past had found inspiration
for their immortal works. And his thoughts spread their wings and
circled above his head; he saw himself already of these masters' craft,
their art his, he wrenching ever new secrets from them, penetrating the
recesses of their genius, becoming one of themselves. In a vision as
vivid as those that cross the brain in a sleepless night, he saw a dark,
compact multitude wait, with breath suspended, to catch the notes that
fell like raindrops from his fingers; saw himself the all-conspicuous
figure, as, with masterful gestures, he compelled the soul that lay
dormant in brass and strings, to give voice to, to interpret to the many,
his subtlest emotions. And he was overcome by a tremulous
compassion with himself at the idea of wielding such power over an
unknown multitude, at the latent nobility of mind and aim this power
implied.
Even when swinging back to the town, he had not shaken himself free
of dreams. The quiet of a foreign midday lay upon the streets, and there
were few discordant sounds, few passers-by, to break the chain of his
thought. He had movememt, silence, space. And as is usual with
active-brained dreamers, he had little or no eye for the real life about
him; he was not struck by the air of comfortable prosperity, of thriving
content, which marked the great commercial centre, and he let pass,
unnoticed, the unfamiliar details of a foreign street, the trifling yet
significant incidents of foreign life. Such impressions as he received,
bore the stamp of his own mood. He was sensible, for instance, in face
of the picturesque houses that clustered together in the centre of the
town, of the spiritual GEMUTLICHKEIT, the absence of any pomp or
pride in their romantic past, which characterises the old buildings of a
German town. These quaint and stately houses, wedged one into the
other, with their many storeys, their steeply sloping roofs and eye-like
roof-windows, were still in sympathetic touch with the trivial life of the
day which swarmed in and about them. He wandered leisurely along
the narrow streets that ran at all angles off the Market Place, one side of
which was formed by the gabled RATHAUS, with its ground-floor row
of busy little shops; and, in fancy, he peopled these streets with the

renowned figures that had once walked them. He looked up at the dark
old houses in which great musicians had lived, died and been born, and
he saw faces that he recognised lean out of the projecting windows, to
watch the life and bustle below, to catch the last sunbeam that filtered
in; he saw them take their daily walk along these very streets, in the
antiquated garments of their time. They passed him by, shadelike and