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.
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