Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/29

 the provinces to Paris and there cultivate his gifts. Voltaire burst out laughing—and was furious. In one of his letters written shortly after this episode we read “Comic opera is nothing but a glorified fair. I know that this form of spectacle is nowadays the nation’s favourite, but I know too how sadly the nation has degenerated. The present century is practically composed of nothing but the refuse of the great age of Louis XIV. This shame is our lot in almost every phase.” This tribute to the age of Louis XIV as so generally superior in everything concerning the arts pleases us immensely. But the great man would have been more equitable if he had called our comic opera a “purified fair.”

It is a great thing for an artist to have the knack of securing the support of influential men of letters. This knack Grétry certainly had. Apart from the impression of superiority which his personality conveyed, nature had endowed him with a good supply of boldness and enterprise. Diderot, Suard, the Abbé Armond, Grimm (all of whom he knew how to flatter intellectually) and the Comte de Creutz the King of Sweden’s minister at Paris, did not wait for his success before shewing their admiration and warmly embracing his cause. His great difficulty was to find a poet and a book of words. Légier, an obscure man of letters, concocted for him a certain “Samnite Marriages” a work which was not accepted for the stage, and failed completely at a private performance at the Prince de Conti’s. The composer accused the performers of having wilfully murdered his work. This mishap would have been enough to estrange for a long time all the operatic poets from such an unlucky collaborator, but for the devotion of the Comte de Creutz, who was 2