Page:Romain Rolland Handel.djvu/201

Rh even in France (generally so unyielding to outside influences).

It is not only of this popularity, a little banal, of which I wish to speak, which one could not ignore—for it is only a stupid pride and a small heart which denies great value to the art which pleases humble people;—what I wish to notice chiefly in the popular character of Handel's music is that it is always truly conceived for the people, and not for an élite dilettanti, as was the French Opera between Lully and Gluck. Without ever departing from his sovereign ideas of beautiful form, in which he gave no concession to the crowd, he reproduced in a language immediately "