Before I speak of the opera, let me say a word or two on the plays.
There is no country in which the theatre has so great a hold on the public as in France; no country in which the successful dramatist has so high a fame; no country perhaps in which the state of the stage so faithfully represents the moral and intellectual condition of the people.

I say this not, of course, from my experience of countries which I have not visited, but from all I hear of the stage in Germany and in England.
The impression left on my mind by the performances I witnessed is, that the French people are becoming dwarfed.

The comedies that please them are but pleasant caricatures of petty sections in a corrupt society.
They contain no large types of human nature; their witticisms convey no luminous flashes of truth; their sentiment is not pure and noble,--it is a sickly and false perversion of the impure and ignoble into travesties of the pure and noble.
Their melodramas cannot be classed as literature: all that really remains of the old French genius is its vaudeville.

Great dramatists create great parts.

One great part, such as a Rachel would gladly have accepted, I have not seen in the dramas of the young generation.
High art has taken refuge in the opera; but that is not French opera.
I do not complain so much that French taste is less refined.