She remembered, too, how Lushington and Mrs. Rushmore had warned her
and entreated her not to become an opera-singer. She had taken her
future into her own hands and had soon found out what it meant to be
a celebrity on the stage; and she had seen only too clearly where
she was classed by the women who would have been her companions and
friends if she had kept out of the profession. She had learned by
experience, too, how little real consideration she could expect from
men of the world, and how very little she could really exact from such
people as Mr. Van Torp; still less could she expect to get it from
persons like Schreiermeyer, who looked upon the gifted men and women
he engaged to sing as so many head of cattle, to be driven more or
less hard according to their value, and to be turned out to starve the
moment they were broken-winded. That fate is sure to overtake the best
of them sooner or later. The career of a great opera-singer is rarely
more than half as long as that of a great tragedian, and even when a
primadonna or a tenor makes a fortune, the decline of their glory is
far more sudden and sad than that of actors generally is. Lady Macbeth
is as great a part as Juliet for an actress of genius, but there are
no 'old parts' for singers; the soprano dare not turn into a contralto
with advancing years, nor does the unapproachable Parsifal of
eight-and-twenty turn into an incomparable Amfortas at fifty. For the
actor, it often happens that the first sign of age is fatigue; in the
singer's day, the first shadow is an eclipse, the first false note is
disaster, the first breakdown is often a heart-rending failure that
brings real tears to the eyes of younger comrades. The exquisite voice
does not grow weak and pathetic and ethereal by degrees, so that we
still love to hear it, even to the end; far more often it is suddenly
flat or sharp by a quarter of a tone throughout whole acts, or it
breaks on one note in a discordant shriek that is the end. Down goes
the curtain then, in the middle of the great opera, and down goes the