Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/159

 those heavy crushing rhythms from which he never manages, if I may put it so, to extricate himself; they betray the lack of breed in his music, just as it often happens that the gait of a man who has arrived at aping a great politeness of manner which deceives nearly everybody, offers to some more observant eyes the living witness of a coarse and vain nature.

In a passionate article against the Huguenots, in which however the merits of Meyerbeer are fully recognised and described, Schumann wrote that everthingeverything [sic] in his music is "fake, appearance, and hypocrisy." Without subscribing to a contradiction of this cruel formula, I would say with more moderation, that by playing the weakest pages of Rossini or Verdi after the best-filled pages of Meyerbeer, one almost always gets the feeling of leaving a stifling atmosphere and stepping into the open air.

I know admirers of Meyerbeer into whose illusion there enters an element of truth.

They are struck with the terrible errors of doctrine and practice in our contemporary theatre music, and they contrast these errors with the example of Meyerbeer. The enthusiasts I have in mind deplore, and quite rightly to my thinking, the excessive intrusion into opera of the symphonic style, and the abandonment of all the old forms and moulds of dramatic music, which used to have great virtue and were founded, to speak the truth, on the very nature of this branch of art. (As to that, all that is needed is to rejuvenate them, correcting those aspects which offend our taste.) These critics deplore also the renunciation of all the spectacu-