The artists of that time were far removed from that love. They wrote
only for a more or less anarchical and vain group, uprooted from the
life of the country, who preened themselves on not sharing the
prejudices and passions of the rest of humanity, or else made a mock of
them. It is a fine sort of fame that is won by self-amputation from
life, so as to be unlike other men! Let all such artists perish! We will
go with the living, be suckled at the breasts of the earth, and drink in
all that is most profound and sacred in our people, and all its love
from the family and the soil. In the greatest age of liberty, among the
people with the most ardent worship of beauty, the young Prince of the
Italian Renaissance, Raphael, glorified maternity in his transteverine
Madonnas. Who is there now to give us in music a _Madonna a la
Chaise?_ Who is there to give us music meet for every hour of life?
You have nothing, you have nothing in France. When you want to give your
people songs, you are reduced to bringing up to date the German masters
of the past. In your art, from top to bottom, everything remains to be
done, or to be done again....

Christophe corresponded with Olivier, who was now settled in a provincial
town. He tried to maintain in correspondence that collaboration which had
been so fruitful during the time when they had lived together. He wanted
him to write him fine poetic words closely allied with the thoughts and
deeds of everyday life, like the poems which are the substance of the old
German _lieder_. Short fragments from the Scriptures and the Hindoo poems,
and the old Greek philosophers, short religious and moral poems, little
pictures of Nature, the emotions of love or family life, the whole poetry
of morning, evening, and night, that is in simple, healthy people. Four
lines or six are enough for a _lied_: only the simplest expressions, and
no elaborate development or subtlety of harmony. What have I to do with