Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/129

 of the genius of his race. But whatever may have been asserted then or since, he armed himself with no weapons but his own. He borrowed nothing from, and yielded nothing to his terrible adversary. Someone has put it whimsically: 'It was on his own shoulders that Verdi always climbed to raise himself higher and higher.' "

In this reform he did not allow his personal sense of expression to be in any way impaired. He simply perfected and purified his instrument of expression. I feel sure that he renewed his musical studies, and we have a curious corroboration of this in a string quartet written in 1873; it is not a masterpiece, but still less is it deserving of contempt; it is very well written according to the rules governing this difficult form. It was not the bandmaster of Busseto who had taught him that. The result in Verdi's work was a nobility of style which reaches grandeur in Aïda, an art of half tones which triumphs in Othello and Falstaff. It seems to me (but I may be mistaken) that in Othello the portrayal of the violent passions of love and hate smacks somewhat of old age. On the other hand, the cold passion of a traitor and consummate master of intrigue is there rendered with a mastery only to be compared with that which created Basile in the Barber; it is one of the things in music that will never die.

I have called the art of Verdi, the earlier Verdi especially, a peasant art. He was himself a peasant, but one of nature's noblemen. Thanks to this characisticcharacteristic [sic] his intellectual development was magnificently extended while retaining a perfect simplicity.