smiling eyes upon the new dawn: and silvery trickling springs were to
bubble forth with the vernal sweet song of streams--a very idyl.

Christophe was delighted. But when he looked at the bills of the Parisian
theaters, he saw the names of Meyerbeer, Gounod, Massenet, and Mascagni and
Leoncavallo--names with which he was only too familiar: and he asked his
friends if all this brazen music, with its girlish rapture, its artificial
flowers, like nothing so much as a perfumery shop, was the garden of Armide
that they had promised him. They were hurt and protested: if they were to
be believed, these things were the last vestiges of a moribund age: no
one attached any value to them. But the fact remained that _Cavalleria
Rusticana_ flourished at the Opera Comique, and _Pagliacci_ at the Opera:
Massenet and Gounod were more frequently performed than anybody else, and
the musical trinity--_Mignon_, _Les Huguenots_, and _Faust_--had safely
crossed the bar of the thousandth performance. But these were only trivial
accidents: there was no need to go and see them. When some untoward fact
upsets a theory, nothing is more simple than to ignore it. The French
critics shut their eyes to these blatant works and to the public which
applauded them: and only a very little more was needed to make them ignore
the whole music-theater in France. The music-theater was to them a literary
form, and therefore impure. (Being all literary men, they set a ban on
literature.) Any music that was expressive, descriptive, suggestive--in
short, any music with any meaning--was condemned as impure. In every
Frenchman there is a Robespierre. He must be for ever chopping the head
off something or somebody to purify it. The great French critics only
recognized pure music: the rest they left to the rabble.

Christophe was rather mortified when he thought how vulgar his taste must
be. But he found some comfort in the discovery that all these musicians who
despised the theater spent their time in writing for it: there was not one