Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/148

 remain not the masterpiece (that is not the right word), but the very brilliant monument of grand opera—I should say of "big" opera.

Thirteen years elapsed between the Huguenots and the Prophet. In spite of this laudably prolonged elaboration, this work did not surpass its predecessor as the latter had surpassed Robert. For my part I place it lower. Parts of the Prophet are brilliant, but the work as a whole leaves the impression of vast emptiness. This is easily explained by the radically uncertain and vacillating character of the plot. The principal character, the prophet, has no real existence. Jean, the young innkeeper of Leyde, lets himself be pushed into the position of religious head of the anabaptists who are stirring up the peasants against their masters. But is he actuated merely by the thought of personal vengeance against the Lord Oberthal who has robbed him of his sweetheart? Or is he on the other hand an inspired fanatic who puts his mystic mission before everything, and has no thought left of sweetheart or mother? He embodies these two contradictory ideas, these two versions, both in turn affirmed and predominating; the story of the vision in the second act only offers a very miserable and vamped up effort at reconciling the two. This moral quality of the hero, this ambiguity of nature in the action, make the Prophet, regarded as drama, a sort of void for the intellect, and prevent the heart from being touched by those great religious scenes, which seem mere veneer. The character of Fides, the mother, is the only one which has a certain moral reality. Whatever be the motive for which her son has put himself at the head of robbers and assassins, the grief of this old