Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/145

 Bertram a masterly creation. Bertram's creation stops short at a red beard and a flame-coloured doublet.

All the moral (so-called) springs of the action, the character of Robert, and all the characters are of the same calibre. And now having spoken of the book, we shall be expected no doubt to talk of the music. But is it not at once obvious that this music can only develop its merits up to a certain level, and that all the virtues to be found in it cannot exclude or make up for a certain essential blemish, a birthmark, traceable to the incongruity of the occasion that provides the reason for its existence? I admit that the famous air of the diabolic summons, "Nuns at rest," is musically welcome, and has a satisfying tragic way about it. But this tragic element—this tragic puppetry, cannot be taken seriously, and merely conveys a touch of the grotesque. I find a very subtle appreciation of it among the night wanderers of Toulouse, when they make the streets of their worthy town (where Meyerbeer is thought a deal of) resound with Bertram's appeal.

It is the same sense of fitness which makes Alphonse Daudet select "Robert, thou whom I adore" as the great dramatic air to be sung at the Bezuquets at Tarascon. Verdi is full of airs that linger in everyone's memory, and that have a popular, often even a vulgar, turn. And yet Daudet would never have given us Verdi at the Bezuquets, and the airs of Traviata are not the ones with which the echoes of the Toulouse streets resound at the break-up of festive dinner parties. There is in them a dignity that protects them, and it is this dignity (of which every connoisseur feels the secret absence in Meyerbeer's ideas) which perhaps does most to give the idea of greatness. We still