Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/226

stirred and fired, by objects less natural), and the magnificence of some of his music, have gained for his literary inventions a certain fictitious reputation. But let us look at them by themselves. How foreign they are to all that is distinctive in ourselves, to all that our own culture has handed down to us, to all that appeals to us in whatever way! And in their exaggerated bigness, what a defect of real richness, what poverty of substance there often is! Is it not madness and servitude to insist on clothing creations of French literature and poetry in the same thick and heavy musical drapery? Our musical poetry, our musical drama, require a lighter garment that allows the luminous body of thought to shine through. Consider the class of subjects that Wagner has to translate into music: the slow and elementary thought of his monumental and childish gods, the violent but short-lived humanity of his heroes with their lack of real characterisation; consider above all the subjects and the spectacles of his mythological and cosmic fairyland, the gallop of the Valkyrs across the clouds, the games of the Germanic water sprites in the depths of the river, the splendours of the divine palace built in the sky, the dragon guardian of the gold, the barrier of fire leaping from the ground at a sign from Wotan, Valhalla falling in ruins through space, the magic lance, the enchanted sword, the giants, the dwarfs, the Norns! All these things really required the twenty to twenty-five brass instruments, and the whole heavy artillery of his orchestra. But for our part we are concerned only with the general expression of human subjects; we have also an old tradition of the picturesque in music; but our picturesque is quick-witted, refined, salted with intelligence, thoroughly rhythmical, and