c by its decorative symmetry had worn out, musicians were shocked by
his symphonies, and, misunderstanding his integrity, openly questioned
his sanity. But to those who were not looking for pretty new sound
patterns, but were longing for the expression of their moods in music,
he achieved revelation, because, being single in his aim to express his
own moods, he anticipated with revolutionary courage and frankness all
the moods of the rising generations of the nineteenth century.

The result was inevitable. In the nineteenth century it was no longer
necessary to be a born pattern designer in sound to be a composer.
One had but to be a dramatist or a poet completely susceptible to
the dramatic and descriptive powers of sound. A race of literary and
theatrical musicians appeared; and Meyerbeer, the first of them, made
an extraordinary impression. The frankly delirious description of his
Robert the Devil in Balzac's short story entitled Gambra, and Goethe's
astonishingly mistaken notion that he could have composed music for
Faust, show how completely the enchantments of the new dramatic music
upset the judgment of artists of eminent discernment. Meyerbeer was,
people said (old gentlemen still say so in Paris), the successor of
Beethoven: he was, if a less perfect musician than Mozart, a profounder
genius. Above all, he was original and daring. Wagner himself raved
about the duet in the fourth act of Les Huguenots as wildly as anyone.

Yet all this effect of originality and profundity was produced by a
quite limited talent for turning striking phrases, exploiting certain
curious and rather catching rhythms and modulations, and devising
suggestive or eccentric instrumentation. On its decorative side, it was
the same phenomenon in music as the Baroque school in architecture: an
energetic struggle to enliven organic decay by mechanical oddities and
novelties. Meyerbeer was no symphonist. He could not apply the thematic
system to his striking phrases, and so had to cobble them into metric
patterns in the old style; and as he was no "absolute musician" either,
he hardly got his metric patterns beyond mere quadrille tunes, which
were either wholly undistinguished, or else made remarkable by certain
brusqueries which, in the true rococo manner, owed their singularity to
their senselessness. He could produce neither a thorough music drama
nor a charming opera. But with all this, and worse, Meyerbeer had some
genuine dramatic energy,