or combines
these qualifications--and that it is improbable that it will be
different in the future. The teachers of elocution have always been the
best that could be found. Although M. Faure is a musician, he has known
how to bring back the classes in tragedy to their original purpose. For
a time they tended towards an objectionable modernism, for they
substituted in their competitions modern prose for the classic verse.
And the study of the latter is very profitable.

Not only is there no harm in this union of elocution and music, but it
would be useful if singers and composers would take advantage of it to
familiarize themselves with the principles of diction, which, in my
opinion, are indispensable to both. Instead, they distrust melody.
Declamation is no longer wanted in operas, and the singers make the
works incomprehensible by not articulating the words. The composers tend
along the same lines, for they give no indication or direction of how
they want the words spoken. All this is regrettable and should be
reformed.

As you see, I object to the mania for reform and end by suggesting
reforms myself. Well, one must be of one's own time, and there is no
escaping the contagion.

CHAPTER III

VICTOR HUGO

Everything in my youth seemed calculated to keep me far removed from
romanticism. Those about me talked only of the great classics and I saw
them welcome Ponsard's _Lucrece_ as a sort of Minerva whose lance was to
route Victor Hugo and his foul crew, of whom they never spoke save with
detestation.

Who was it, I wonder, who had the happy idea of giving me, elegantly
bound, the first volumes of Victor Hugo's poems? I have forgotten who it
was, but I remember what joy the vibrations of his lyre gave me. Until
that time poetry had seemed to me something cold, respectable and
far-away, and it was much later that the living beauty of our classics
was revealed to me. I found myself at once stirred to the depths, and,
as my temperament is essentially musical in everything, I began to sing
them.

People have told me _ad nauseam_ (and they still tell me so) that
beautiful verse is inimical to music, or rather that music is inimical
to good verse; that music demands ordinary verse, rhymed prose, rather
than verse, which is malleable and reducible as the composer wishes.
This generalization is assuredly true, if the music is written first and
then adapted to the words, but that is not the ideal harmony between