He worked hard
and well in the art school, where he obtained a silver medal 'for a
couple of legs the size of life drawn from one of Raphael's
cartoons.' His holidays were spent in sketching; his evenings,
when they were free, at the theatre. Here at the opera he
discovered besides a taste for a new art, the art of music; and it
was, he wrote, 'as if he had found out a heaven on earth.' 'I am
so anxious that whatever he professes to know, he should really
perfectly possess,' his mother wrote, 'that I spare no pains';
neither to him nor to myself, she might have added. And so when he
begged to be allowed to learn the piano, she started him with
characteristic barbarity on the scales; and heard in consequence
'heart-rending groans' and saw 'anguished claspings of hands' as he
lost his way among their arid intricacies.
In this picture of the lad at the piano, there is something, for
the period, girlish. He was indeed his mother's boy; and it was
fortunate his mother was not altogether feminine. She gave her son
a womanly delicacy in morals, to a man's taste - to his own taste
in later life - too finely spun, and perhaps more elegant than
healthful.
Pages:
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86