Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/26

 that are due to his study of the Italian masters, an increased abundance of colouring, melody, and musical breadth in which may be detected the soft brilliance of a Roman reflection.

Unfortunately in Grétry’s comic operas there is something besides Grétry’s music. At the same time that this form was receiving from him on the musical side a new influx of richness, on the literary side it was undergoing the influence and the intrusion of the most detestable sentimental fashion. We are dealing with the years that Rousseau dominates with his eloquent imbecilities—years when what passes for the most beautiful quality and the highest praise is “sensibility.” An epidemic of “sensibility” was raging in French society in those days. People gave themselves up to emotional crises and outpourings of heart. They heaved sighs at the mere name of virtue. They believed, and took pleasure in believing that in the matter of morals, sentiments, emotions, joys, and moral maxims, Nature had only just been discovered and realised for the first time. They went into ecstasies on Nature’s bounty. A game like this game of imagination sooner or later gets taken seriously and makes people rather silly. The poets who supplied Grétry were second-rate writers, and consequently more at the mercy of fashion than others; and too often they modelled their plots and their language on this mania.

But Grétry rose far superior to all this rubbish. There was nothing rubbishy about the music to which he set it. For his work he drew his inspiration not from the stuff itself but from the sound and true sentiments of which after all such productions are the caricature, and as it were the comedy. It is very true