They distrust all gaiety and declare it unesthetic.

As the good public cannot resign itself to getting along without gaiety, it goes to operetta and turns naturally to Offenbach who created it and furnished an inexhaustible supply.

My phrase is not exaggerated, for Offenbach hardly dreamed of creating an art.

He was endowed with a genius for the comic and an abundance of melody, but he had no thought of doing anything beyond providing material for the theatre he managed at the time.

As a matter of fact he was almost its only author.
He was unable to rid himself of his Germanic influences and so corrupted the taste of an entire generation by his false prosody, which has been incorrectly considered originality.