your esthetic tricks? Love my life, help me to love it and to live it.
Write me the _Hours of France_, my _Great_ and _Small Hours_. And let us
together find the clearest melody. Let us avoid like the plague any
artistic language that belongs to a caste like that of so many writers,
and especially of so many French musicians of to-day. We must have the
courage to speak like men, and not like "artists." We must draw upon the
common fund of all men, and unashamedly make use of old formulae, upon
which the ages have set their seal, formulas which the ages have filled
with their spirit. Look at what our forefathers have done. It was by
returning to the musical language of all men that the art of the German
classics of the eighteenth century came into being. The melodies of Gluck
and the creators of the symphony are sometimes trivial and commonplace
compared with the subtle and erudite phrases of Johann Sebastian Bach and
Rameau. It is their raciness of the soil that gives such zest to, and has
procured such immense popularity for the German classics. They began with
the simplest musical forms, the _lied_ and the _Singspiel_, the little
flowers of everyday life which impregnated the childhood of men like
Mozart and Weber.--Do you do the same. Write songs for all and sundry.
Upon that basis you will soon build quartettes and symphonies. What is
the good of rushing ahead? The pyramids were not begun at the top. Your
symphonies at present are trunkless heads, ideas without any stuffing.
Oh, you fair spirits, become incarnate! There must be generations of
musicians patiently and joyously and piously living in brotherhood with
these people. No musical art was ever built in a day.

Christophe was not content to apply these principles in music: he urged
Olivier to set himself at the head of a similar movement in literature:

"The writers of to-day," he said, "waste their energy in describing
human rarities, or cases that are common enough in the abnormal groups