Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/121

 their lips. Such a poet would therein be a moralist, but would he be true to nature? Well, there is nothing comic in loving life, that dear life which we enjoy only once. This chorus of poltroons is a marvellous musical passage.

Let us pass to the other end of the chain. What a creation is that of Iago in Verdi's Othello! In this work by a septuagenarian artist, fine as it is as a whole, and possessing so touching a nobility of atmosphere, I confess that the expression of love appears to me weak and faintly portrayed; but that of warlike heroism is warm and strong. And what shall we say of the outline of the traitor? Nothing charms my mind like the passage where he tells Othello that he has heard Cassio dreaming of Desdemona. The melody lets fall with a sort of gentle heedlessness the drops of mortal poison, and is interrupted with little pauses, as though to give each drop time to find its way right into the Moor's honest and rugged heart. And it is a delicious melody.

A delicious melody of love or springtime may spring up and grow in any climate. But as to a delicious melody of treachery, that seems to me to belong to a suppleness of musical imagination peculiar to the Italians, and itself traceable to the extraordinary mimetic gifts of that race.

There is another strain in which Italian dramatic music has often excelled, and we must look for it at the opposite end of human sentiments—the note of heroism, more particularly civic heroism. It is is to be found in Rossini's second masterpiece, William Tell;—I would not say that it is a masterpiece from beginning to end; time has tarnished several portions. I willingly throw to the wolves the formulae of