soft, pale, enervated, anemic, wasting away. It was then the mode in
France, among the fastidious, to whisper in music. And they were quite
right: for as soon as they tried to talk aloud they shouted: there was no
mean. There was no alternative but distinguished somnolence and
melodramatic declamation.

Christophe shook off the drowsiness that was creeping over him, and looked
at his program; and he was surprised to read that the little puffs of cloud
floating across the gray sky claimed to represent certain definite things.
For, in spite of theory, all their pure music was almost always program
music, or at least music descriptive of a certain subject. It was in vain
that they denounced literature: they needed the support of a literary
crutch. Strange crutches they were, too, as a rule! Christophe observed
the odd puerility of the subjects which they labored to depict--orchards,
kitchen-gardens, farmyards, musical menageries, a whole Zoo. Some musicians
transposed for orchestra or piano the pictures in the Louvre, or the
frescoes of the Opera: they turned into music Cuyp, Baudry, and Paul
Potter: explanatory notes helped the hearer to recognize the apple of
Paris, a Dutch inn, or the crupper of a white horse. To Christophe it was
like the production of children obsessed by images, who, not knowing how to
draw, scribble down in their exercise-books anything that comes into their
heads, and naively write down under it in large letters an inscription to
the effect that it is a house or a tree.

But besides these blind image-fanciers who saw with their ears, there were
the philosophers: they discussed metaphysical problems in music: their
symphonies were composed of the struggle between abstract principles and
stated symbols or religions. And in their operas they affected to study the
judicial and social questions of the day: the Declaration of the Rights of
Woman and the Citizen, elaborated by the metaphysicians of the Butte and