The last stage constituted a partial return to the first; he reverted to his former freedom and suppleness of touch. But the method is more direct and the content more realistic and crude, although there is still the same lyrical tenderness. His colours are bolder and hotter, and it is alleged that he strengthened them purposely with a view to their being modified by time. This appears to me a most dangerous doctrine. How could one ever be certain that the present wrong tones would be altered by exposure to exactly the correct tones? And why put oneself to such pain in the present for the sake of an uncertain future? For it must be very painful to a sensitive artist to create something out of tone, even on purpose. For these reasons (and without the backing of any authority) I rather doubt whether there is much truth in this intended excuse. And I doubt whether any excuse is necessary. I believe that in the majority of cases Renoir meant something by this hotter colour, and that in this respect the pictures are their own justification. It is impossible to hail all of them as masterpieces. Many definitely betray loss of vitality and imagination. But I cannot agree that the work of this period is that of an invalided old man who is living sentimentally on his past.
There has recently been on view, at the Chelsea Book Club, a collection of oil paintings and pastels by Renoir. Some of them were relatively unimportant earlier works, but the majority belonged to the later period. None of them, with the exception, perhaps, of a flower piece and a small head of a woman, can be ranked very high; but they indicate the limits and at the same time the mellow charm of the work of this time. This charm is not perhaps immediately felt; it grows upon one, but it is quite real. In his old age Renoir remained as much as ever a poet, only his poetry is thinner and more fragile.
Renoir was born in 1841 and died in 1919. Of his famous contemporaries only Claude Monet is still alive.
HOWARD HANNAY
MUSIC
THE NATURALIZATION OF OPERA IN ENGLAND
IN Italy opera is a tree which has sprung from a seed and grown swiftly in the course of centuries to an exuberant, perhaps an over-exuberant, maturity. It has been fertilised from other countries, but its trunk has kept one firm straight line by its own perfectly natural development. In England that tree has not flourished. Various attempts have been made to naturalize it, but for the most part the English cultivators never produced more than stunted and distorted growths. Even when they seemed to do well for a time they bore curiously little resemblance to their original parent. Other gardeners, observing how meagrely the tree prospered in the open ground, transplanted opera full-grown from Italy, and did their best to provide it artificially with its own soil and its own climate. It was an expensive amusement, and the more expensive it was the more successful its promoters proclaimed it to be. But it could not be called naturalization. The only course which has shown any signs of being practicable was to graft the foreign shoot on to a sturdy native growth, if a suitable stock could be found. But it is a process requiring careful handling and careful watching, for the tree takes a long time to become thoroughly acclimatized.
It is pretty generally agreed that English opera must be preceded by opera in English. Our public—our real public, that is to say, not the handful of people who concentrate a special attention on opera, both English and foreign—will not be ready to take new native operas to their hearts until they have got thoroughly into the habit of enjoying those popular works which form the international repertory. Those operas—Faust, Carmen, Il Trovatore, and the rest—are popular in England already, it will be said. Yes, as operas go, they are indeed popular; but only among those people, in whatever section of society, who have developed the opera habit. For even in what are called the popular theatres, where they are played in English to cheap and crowded audiences, they are almost always exotic still. If it were not that a large majority of operas are called by the names of their principal characters, we should see more significance in the fact that we speak of the others in nearly every case by their native titles, and do not translate them. We have learnt to talk of The Magic Flute and The Flying Dutchman; but even at the "Old Vic." they keep the names of Il Trovatore, La Traviata, and Cavalleria Rusticana.