Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/41

 to follow the lines of imagination, letting yourself go and often leaving truth behind in the pursuit of the wonderful. But when you depict men, you must paint from nature; the portraits have to be likenesses and your labour is in vain if your models are unrecognisable."

Grétry has admirably depicted brazen greed in the Two Misers, love-lorn and jealous old age in the Jealous Lover, paternal tenderness and grief in Zémire and Azor, friendship and chivalrous fidelity in Richard, domestic happiness in Lucile, the impulses, cheerfulness and passing moments of despair of young lovers, here and there throughout his works; and in a score of places too we find him an admirable subject-painter, in his scenes of village festivals, in accounts of battles. journeys, storm and shipwreck. I have mentioned Molière I do not say that Grétry was a Molière. But he is at least a Regnard, a very prolific Regnard with great ease of production.

Like all great artists, like all choice spirits, he collected and welded together in his personality the most precious elements of the influences to which he had been subject: influences which would in several respects have been mutually destructive in the case of a second-rate mind. His music has something of Paris, and the Ile de France, something of Rome (I do not mean the Rome of Michel Angelo, but of Pergolesi and the eighteenth century), something also of Liège and the Walloon country. From this last source it draws a simplicity, a sort of solidity of construction, which without preventing it from having much life and spirit, does prevent it from having too much. Consider in the Richard (I prefer to take my examples from a score which is accessible to all) these