Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/160

 lar part of the opera of tradition, which as long as it was confined to its proper place and inspired by intelligence and taste gave music a magnificent field of expansion. It is because they are against these departures from the right road that they love Meyerbeer, but in that I think they are wrong.

Meyerbeer practised all that they lay down. But he practised it by corrupting it, coarsening it and debasing, [sic] it. He practised it as a cosmopolitan manipulator, strongly and brilliantly endowed indeed, far more than as an artist in blood and race. He thus did a great deal to destroy the authority of the very tradition with which hasty consideration connects him, though he had nothing of its spirit, and he it was who made an opening for the Wagnerian invasion. If Meyerbeer's music had really been French nothing would have been more justifiable than that invasion. But French music is something quite different.

The Meyerbeer style has been disastrous to music, because it inspired a contempt for it, or at the very least a lack of interest in it, among a considerable part of the intellectual élite of France. There we have a new fact of the nineteenth century. Before that time all our best people were passionately devoted to music. But how many fastidious minds who only knew it by this spoilt art-form, refused to take an interest in an art which they thought necessarily implied, on its literary side, a foundation of absurdity.

The Meyerbeer style has been disastrous outside the realm of art by its influence on the historical and political ideas of the French people. In the days when it flourished how many good people, especially in the provinces, never opened a book, but used to go to the theatre to hear Robert, The Huguenots, The Prophet,