Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/152

 point of my criticism. Attribute to him all the other virtues, and I will reason with you. But if you do not feel the radical absence of that quality, without which one may say tersely that nothing is any good, without which nothing can be achieved but a more or less successful "stunt," then discussion is useless. There is nothing surprising in this peculiarity of Meyerbeer's music, for it is not his own, it is other people's. Whose? Everybody's, provided they were great or successful. It is the music of everybody whom Germany, Italy and France had been applauding for half a century or a century. It is Handel's, Rossini's, Mozart's, Boïeldieu's, Beethoven's, Herold's—not forgetting Glück, Spontini, and Spohr. It is the music of reflection.

Legitimate imitation, as practised by all great artists, consists of steeping oneself in the works of the masters, not in order to reproduce their style and manner, but in order to provide one's personal inspiration with means of expression. This inspiration when it exists infuses a new life into the substance of what is borrowed and transfigures it. To have mastered certain delicate secrets of French rhythm in Anatole France or Lemaître, is a totally different thing from writing diluted Anatole France or Lemaître Meyerbeer writes diluted Handel, Rossini, etc. Even then it would not be so bad if he had only taken one model, or only one to each opera. But he passes from one to another and back again in the course of a single work, a single act, a single scene, a single page. And this patchwork of styles gives the most tangible evidence for the proof of his eternal alibi.

Imagine a Delille possessed of talent and rhetorical cleverness, but having no poetic accent of his own, and