Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/27

 that “Nature” is good in everything, that she claims her part as counsellor and mistress in men’s lives; it is very true that simplicity of character and tastes is a condition of happiness, that we should love virtue, that goodness brings more happiness than wickedness, that mankind knows no joys more sure and enviable than those of affection and friendship—joys unknown to the wicked and the vain. But precisely because these truths are the most natural and most pleasant to realise, and further because it is only given to sincere and delicate hearts to be steeped in them and put them into practice—for these very reasons it is all the more ghastly to make an affectation and indiscreet display of them, to emphasise them and make them a subject of ostentation and vanity. Grétry felt these truths not theatrically or rhetorically or as a matter of “frills,” but as a decent man and a poet, and as such with nobleness and simplicity. He expressed in music their effect on him, fully, sweetly, and smoothly. No better illustration could be given than the famous quartet in his opera Lucile, “Where better should one be than in the bosom of one’s family?” The words are deplorable, enough to disgust one with family life. But the music is frank, broad, natural, reasonably hearty, full of downrightness and geniality. It depicts as they should be depicted the happiness of good folk who experience, glass in hand, the pleasure of affectionate intercourse with no reserve.

In some of Grétry’s successors we find this rubbishy nonsense of false sensibility communicating itself to the music. His music is admirably free from it. But we are left with the spoken part of several of his