And this barometer is registering what is happening just now in the world of music, where a movement has been making itself felt in France for several years, whose effect other nations—­perhaps more musical nations—­will not feel till later.  For the nations that have the strongest artistic traditions are not necessarily those that are likely to develop a new art.  To do that one must have a virgin soil and spirits untrammelled by a heritage from the past.  In 1870 no one had a lighter heritage to bear than French musicians; for the past had been forgotten, and such a thing as real musical education did not exist.

The musical weakness of that time was a very curious thing, and has given many people the impression that France has never been a musical nation.  Historically speaking, nothing could be more wrong.  Certainly there are races more gifted in music than others; but often the seeming differences of race are really the differences of time; and a nation appears great or little in its art according to what period of its history we consider.  England was a musical nation until the Revolution of 1688; France was the greatest musical nation in the sixteenth century; and the recent publications of M. Henry Expert have given us a glimpse of the originality and perfection of the Franco-Belgian art during the Renaissance.  But without going back as far as that, we find that Paris was a very musical town at the time of the Restoration, at the time of the first performance of Beethoven’s symphonies at the Conservatoire, and the first great works of Berlioz, and the Italian Opera.  In Berlioz’s Memoires you can read about the enthusiasm, the tears, and the feeling, that the performances of Gluck’s and Spontini’s operas aroused; and in the same book one sees clearly that this musical warmth lasted until 1840, after which it died down little by little, and was succeeded by complete musical apathy in the second Empire—­an apathy from which Berlioz suffered cruelly, so that one may even say he died crushed by the indifference of the public.  At this time Meyerbeer was reigning at the Opera.  This incredible weakening of musical feeling in France, from 1840 to 1870, is nowhere better shown than in its romantic and realistic writers, for whom music was an hermetically sealed door.  All these artists were “visuels,” for whom music was only a noise.  Hugo is supposed to have said that Germany’s inferiority was measured by its superiority in music.[204] “The elder Dumas detested,” Berlioz says, “even bad music."[205] The journal of the Goncourts calmly reflects the almost universal scorn of literary men for music.  In a conversation which took place in 1862 between Goncourt and Theophile Gautier, Goncourt said: 

“We confessed to him our complete infirmity, our musical deafness—­we who, at the most, only liked military music.”

[Footnote 204:  One must at least do Hugo the justice of saying that he always spoke of Beethoven with admiration, although he did not know him.  But he rather exalts him in order to take away from the importance of a poet—­the only one in the nineteenth century—­whose fame was shading his own; and when he wrote in his William Shakespeare that “the great man of Germany is Beethoven” it was understood by all to mean “the great man of Germany is not Goethe.”]