Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/67

 we are told, "to be coming out of a sort of ecstasy."

Let us not on that account picture him as a figure of fun, a childlike, innocent dreamer, a stranger to everything but music, without action or defence in life. He was not that type at all. His abstraction is not the voluptuous slackness of an aesthete who dreads the harshness of human contact arid the fatigue of business. It is the symptonsymptom [sic] of a strong and tenacious will that has a horror of scattered energies, and concentrates on the main issue, the unum necessarium. Business does not frighten him, and he handles briskly the men with whom he has dealings. He is known as a rugged character, energetic, imperious, brusque, even crushing. He makes the artists who have to perform his works tremble. At rehearsals " he used to sit in the pit, where he insisted on being alone; if anyone came to see him there, he would wave him away without speaking to him or even looking at him." Here is another important detail—he was a miser; his was a solid middle-class avarice, which growing on this stock of greatness and genius, stands out in high colours, and would have delighted Regnard and inspired his wit. But there is no reason to suppose that this avarice, even if it went somewhat beyond the limits of wisdom, ever reached a morbid stage. Nor must we confuse a certain harshness of character, a certain sententious and hard caustic quality of mind with the fancy picture of a brutal, thick-skinned, distorted character, barbarous husband and cruel father, painted by his enemies, notably Diderot, Grimm, and the Lyric writer Collé. This literary rabble is not worthy of credit; obviously it is taking its revenge for hard blows, and for rejected opera libretti. One of Rameau's fellow citizens tells us