Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/142

 one can expect, or rather all one ought to exact, from the poet of opera is that he should contribute in his adaptations good sense, a delicate and sure taste, a certain grace and a good style.

I would add that the services rendered to music by literary masterpieces may also be rendered by subjects which though, they have not found their Sophocles, their Vergil, their Tasso or their Racine, have yet undergone some treatment by the human imagination that is familiar to all; for instance legendary traditions or popular tales. The essential thing is that Music should find a certain poetic elaboration completed and ready to her hand. Perhaps I shall here be confronted with examples such as Verdi (Verdi in his earlier days) who more often that not worked on the coarsest and most raw dramatic material. His case is exceptional, but it bears out the idea; for in this early manner Verdi (whom I passionately admire) while showing sufficient strength to raise a poor subject above its own level in places, is yet lacking in general harmony and order, and his spurts of genius do not constitute a style. Then again, the dramatic poems on which he works are very simple and elementary in their shrivelled roughness, a fact which allows him great freedom to interpret and almost to create the subject himself.

Meyerbeer's "books" on the other hand are complicated and turgid, and the action gets involved in a great deal of ostentation.

Let us however make no mistake about the quality of the ambition shown by Meyerbeer's choice of these books. It is a large but modest ambition. The course steered by him from Robert the Devil on proves that he had arrived at a true knowledge of himself.