ut it will stand repeating, it is not
the absence of defects but the presence of merits which makes works and
men great. It is not always well to be without blemish. A too regular
face or too pure a voice lacks expression. If there is no such thing as
perfection in this world, it is doubtless because it is not needed.

As I do not belong to that biased school which pretends to see Peter
entirely white and Paul utterly black, I do not try to make myself think
that the author of _Les Huguenots_ had no faults.

The most serious, but the most excusable, is his contempt for prosody
and his indifference to the verse entrusted to him. This fault is
excusable for the French school of the time, heedless of tradition, set
him a bad example. Rossini was, like Meyerbeer, a foreigner, but he was
not affected in the same way. He even got fine effects through the
combination of musical and textual rhythm. An instance of this is seen
in the famous phrase in _Guillaume Tell_:

Ces jours qu'ils ont ose proscrire,
Je ne les ai pas defendus.
Mon pere, tu m'as du maudire!

If Rossini had not retired at an age when others are just beginning
their careers and had given us two or three more works, his illustrious
example would have restored the old principles on which French opera
had been constructed from the time of Lulli. On the contrary, Auber
carried with him an entire generation captivated by Italian music. He
even went so far as to put French words into Italian rhythm. The famous
duet _Amour sacre de la Patrie_ is versified as if the text were _Amore
sacro della patria._ This is seen only in reading it, for it is never
sung as it is written.

Meyerbeer was, then, excusable to a certain extent, but he abused all
indulgence in such matters. In order to preserve intact his musical
forms--even in recitatives, which are, as a matter of fact, only
declamation set to music--he accented the weak syllables and vice versa;
he added words and made unnecessarily false verse, and transformed bad
verse into worse prose. He might have avoided all these literary
abominations without any harm to the effect by a slight modification of
the music. The verses given to musicians were often very bad, for that
was the fashion. The versifier thought he had done his duty by his
collaborator by giving him verses like this:

Triomphe que j'aime!
Ta frayeur extreme
Va malgre toi-meme
Te livrer a moi!

But when Scribe abandoned