Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/19

Rh them and had played them on his organ. Grétry paid more attention to Renekin than to Moreau. In that he was only following the natural tendency of a period of life which usually prefers facility to discipline when it has the choice. Unfortunately in his case this was not merely a youthful negligence, and in the years that followed he never learnt the necessity of severe studies in his art. At Rome where he spent eight years, we shall find that his school work remained superficial and incomplete; so much so that when he left that town his master Casali recommended him to a colleague at Geneva in these curious terms: “I am sending you one of my pupils, a perfect ass in music, and knowing nothing, but a pleasant young fellow of good character.” “Ass” is more than an exaggeration, and beyond all doubt the man who saw in a Grétry only his weakness in counterpoint reveals himself to us as a pedant. It is none the less true that Grétry had reduced his apprenticeship to too limited a field. Criticism is obliged to take note of this, because of the vast resources of invention and expression of which these gaps in the technical structure deprived a genius marvellously endowed by nature.

Let us not however delude ourselves as to the significance and extent of such gaps in the case of Grétry. We have seen other great musicians possessing more genius than craftsmanship and being more or less seriously hampered thereby in the manifestation and realisation of that same genius. But with them this technical insufficiency was associated (strangely enough) with what one might call an insufficiency of natural musicality, or sense of music. Berlioz for instance. He abounds in eloquent and poetic