d of his
adoption by showing it, at the moment it was prepared to perceive it,
the face of a true. The French are not an outstandingly musical race.
Music plays a comparatively insignificant role in their civilization.
The mass of the people does not demand it, has never demanded it as
insistently as do Germans and Russians, and as did the mass of Italians
during the Renaissance, the mass of English before the Revolution.
Something of a prejudice against its own musical impulse must exist in
the race. For though France has a very definite musical feeling, a thing
that varies little with the passing centuries and makes for the
surprising similarities between the work of Claude Le Jeune in the
sixteenth century, Rameau in the eighteenth and Debussy in the
twentieth, she has, during her thousand years of culture, and while
producing a flood of illustrious authors, and painters and sculptors,
borne not more than four or five composers of indisputably first rank.
Germany in the course of two centuries produced at least eight or nine;
Russia three within the last fifty years. In France centuries elapse
between the appearance of a Josquin des Pres in the fifteenth century, a
Rameau in the eighteenth, a Debussy in the early twentieth. And whenever
the French have been given a musical art of their own, whenever a
composer comparable to the Goujons and Montaignes, the Renoirs and the
Baudelaires has made his appearance among them, they generally have been
swift to turn from him and to prefer to him not only foreigners, which
would not necessarily be bad, but oftentimes the least respectable of
musicians. The triumph of Rameau was of the briefest. Scarcely had his
magnificent lyric tragedies established themselves when the _Guerre des
bouffons_ broke out, and popular taste, under the direction of Jean
Jacques Rousseau and the other Encyclopedists, discovered the light
Italian music of the day more "natural" and infinitely preferable to the
severe and noble forms of the greatest of French composers. The
appearance of Gluck gave Rameau's work a veritable _coup de grace_, and
banished the master from the operatic stage. And for a century and a
quarter, French music, particularly the music of the theater, was
completely unfaithful to the racial spirit. During the greater part of
the nineteenth century, Rossini and Meyerbeer dominated the operatic
world. The native operatic composers, Auber and Boieldieu, Adam and
Halevy, combined the s