(46.) The H ... G ...[86] is distinctly less than nothing, and there are a good many works like it. There is as much trickery required to grow rich by a stupid book as there is folly in buying it; a man would never know the peopleʼs taste if he did not venture sometimes on some great piece of silliness.
(47.) We perceive that an opera is an outline of a magnificent spectacle, of which it serves to give an idea.
I cannot understand how the opera, with such perfect music and quite a regal expenditure, has been able to tire me.[87]
There are some passages in an opera which make us long for others; it sometimes happens we wish it was all over: this is the fault of the decorations, or of a want of action or interest.
An opera is not even to this day a poem, for it contains nought but verses; nor is it a spectacle, since machinery has disappeared through the dexterous management of Amphion and his kindred;[88] it is a concert of voices assisted by instruments. We deceive ourselves and acquire a bad taste when we state, as has been done, that machinery is only an amusement fit for children and suitable for puppet-shows.[89] Machines increase and embellish poetical fiction and maintain among the spectators that gentle illusion in which the entire pleasure of a theatre consists, to which it also adds a feeling of wonder. There is no need of flights, or cars, or changes when _Bérénice_ or _Pénélope_[90] are represented, but they are necessary in an opera, as the characteristic of such a spectacle is to enchant the mind as well as the ear and the eye.
(48.) Some busybodies[91] have erected a theatre and machinery, composed ballets, verses, and music; theirs is the whole spectacle, even to the room where the performance was held, from the roof to the very foundation of the four walls. Who has any doubt that the hunt on the water,[92] the delights of “La Table,”[93] the marvels of the Labyrinth[94] were also invented by them? I think so, at least, by the agitation they are in and by the self-satisfied air with which they applaud their success. Unless I am deceived, they have not contributed anything to a festival so splendid, so magnificent, and so long kept up, and which one person planned and paid for; so that I admire two things: the ease and quietness of him who directed everything, and the fuss and gesticulations of those who did nothing.[95]