"_Ach, um Gotteswillen!_" he went on, shrugging his shoulders, "try to forget what you are! Try to forget that none of you ever had a wicked thought or an unholy aspiration--"
("Don't they see how he is laughing at them?" I wondered.)
"You, Chorus of the Condemned, try to conjure up every wicked thought you can, and let it come out in your voices--you who sing the strains of the blessed ones, think of what blessedness is. Surely each of you has his own idea! Some of you may agree with Lenore:
"'Bei ihm, bei ihm ist Seligkeit, Und ohne Wilhelm Holle!'
"If so, think of him; think of her--only sing it, whatever it is. Remember the strongest of feelings:
"'Die Engel nennen es Himmelsfreude Die Teufel nennen es Höllenqual, Die Menschen nennen es--LIEBE!'
He had not become loud or excited in voice or gesticulation, but his words, flung at them like so many scornful little bullets, the indifferent resignation of his attitude, had their effect upon the crew of giggling, simpering girls and awkward, self-conscious young men. Some idea seemed vouchsafed to them that perhaps their performance had not been quite all that it might have been; they began in a little more earnest, and the chorus went better.
For my own part, I was deeply moved. A vague excitement, a wild, and not altogether a holy one, had stolen over me. I understood now how the man might have influence. I bent to the power of his will, which reached me where I stood in the background, from his dark eyes, which turned for a moment to me now and then. It was that will of his which put me as it were suddenly into the spirit of the music, and revealed me depths in my own heart at which I had never even guessed. Excited, with cheeks burning and my heart hot within me, I followed his words and his gestures, and grew so impatient of the dull stupidity of the others that tears came to my eyes. How could that young woman, in the midst of a sublime chorus, deliberately pause, arrange the knot of her neck-tie, and then, after a smile and a side glance at the conductor, go on again with a more self-satisfied simper than ever upon her lips? What might not the thing be with a whole chorus of sympathetic singers? The very dullness which in face prevailed revealed to me great regions of possible splendor, almost too vast to think of.