antly used by Mozart, who gives just
such a chorus to the devils in _Don Giovanni_."

By plying Gambara, meanwhile, with fresh libations, Andrea thus strove,
by his contradictoriness, to bring the musician back to a true sense of
music, by proving to him that his so-called mission was not to try to
regenerate an art beyond his powers, but to seek to express himself in
another form; namely, that of poetry.

"But, my dear Count, you have understood nothing of that stupendous
musical drama," said Gambara, airily, as standing in front of Andrea's
piano he struck the keys, listened to the tone, and then seated himself,
meditating for a few minutes as if to collect his ideas.

"To begin with, you must know," said he, "that an ear as practised as
mine at once detected that labor of choice and setting of which you
spoke. Yes, the music has been selected, lovingly, from the storehouse
of a rich and fertile imagination wherein learning has squeezed every
idea to extract the very essence of music. I will illustrate the
process."

He rose to carry the candles into the adjoining room, and before sitting
down again he drank a full glass of Giro, a Sardinian wine, as full of
fire as the old wines of Tokay can inspire.

"Now, you see," said Gambara, "this music is not written for
misbelievers, nor for those who know not love. If you have never
suffered from the virulent attacks of an evil spirit who shifts your
object just as you are taking aim, who puts a fatal end to your highest
hopes,--in one word, if you have never felt the devil's tail whisking
over the world, the opera of _Robert le Diable_ must be to you, what the
Apocalypse is to those who believe that all things will end with
them. But if, persecuted and wretched, you understand that Spirit of
Evil,--the monstrous ape who is perpetually employed in destroying the
work of God,--if you can conceive of him as having, not indeed loved,
but ravished, an almost divine woman, and achieved through her the
joy of paternity; as so loving his son that he would rather have him
eternally miserable with himself than think of him as eternally happy
with God; if, finally, you can imagine the mother's soul for ever
hovering over the child's head to snatch it from the atrocious
temptations offered by its father,--even then you will have but a faint
idea of this stupendous drama, which needs but little to make it worthy
of comparison with Mozart's _Don Giovanni_. _Don Giovanni_ is in its