ng to make honey elsewhere too."

IV.

MEHUL labored successfully in adapting the noble and severe style of
Gluck to the changing requirements of the French stage. The turmoil and
passions of the revolution had stirred men's souls to the very roots,
and this influence was perpetuated and crystallized in the new forms
given to French thought by Napoleon's wonderful career. Mehul's
musical conceptions, which culminated in the opera of "Joseph," were
characterized by a stir, a vigor, and largeness of dramatic movement,
which came close to the familiar life of that remarkable period. His
great rival Cherubini, on the other hand, though no less truly dramatic
in fitting musical expression to thought and passion, was so austere
and rigid in his ideals, so dominated by musical form and an accurate
science which would concede nothing to popular prejudice and ignorance,
that he won his laurels, not by force of the natural flow of popular
sympathy, but by the sheer might of his genius. Cherubini's severe works
made them models and foundation stones for his successors in French
music; but Mehul familiarized his audiences with strains dignified yet
popular, full of massive effects and brilliant combinations. The people
felt the tramp of the Napoleonic armies in the vigor and movement of his
measures.

Spontini embodied the same influences and characteristics in still
larger degree, for his musical genius was organized on a more massive
plan. Deficient in pure graceful melody alike with Mehul, he delighted
in great masses of tone and vivid orchestral coloring. His music was
full of the military fire of his age, and dealt for the most part with
the peculiar tastes and passions engendered by a condition of chronic
warfare. Therefore dramatic movement in his operas was always of the
heroic order, and never touched the more subtile and complex elements
of life. Spontini added to the majestic repose and ideality of the Gluck
music-drama (to use a name now naturalized in art by Wagner) the keenest
dramatic vigor. Though he had a strong command of effects by his power
of delineation and delicacy of detail, his prevalent tastes led him to
encumber his music too often with overpowering military effects, alike
tonal and scenic. Riehl, a great German critic, says: "He is more
successful in the delineation of masses and groups than in the portrayal
of emotional scenes; his rendering of the national struggle between the
Spaniards and Mexica