Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/117

 strained, or without wasting in the effort their real strength. The French character requires a more temperate mode of expression, more analytical, one that brings out more fine shades and, if I dare say so, more ideas in each sentiment. In our literary classical theatre, the dialogue of the characters with one another is accompanied by the internal dialogue of each character with himself. It cannot be otherwise in a good French opera—Rameau, the Racine of music, has given imcomparable examples of this touching musical psychology; it does not indeed exclude in his case, and never should exclude, beauty from the lines (see the monologue of Theseus in the last act of the Hippolytus), but we may admit that it cannot clothe itself with that sensuous richness, that fine rapture of movement which are peculiar to Italian music. To each their own virtues. I would add to each the virtues of others, in so far as they can enrich their own without destroying them. The hangers-on of Wagner pooh-pooh the Italians, and they are fools to do so. And yet no one was more steeped in the work of the Italians than their god, and he borrowed largely from their resources of musical action (see the duo in Tristan). But he did so with a fidelity to his own nature which should be taken as an example.

I can only explain the contempt into which Rossini has fallen with certain musical minds as being due to an obscuration of the musical sense. In my youth I myself subscribed on trust to this disdain, but in those days I did not know Rossini, and frequented a good deal the Wagnerian sect, now dispersed. In