while in “Romeo” the stage was encumbered with Tybalt, Capulet, Mercutio, Laurent; and what would have been Mozart’s opportunity was his undoing.  He could give none of them pungent or characteristic language; they are the merest Italian operatic puppets; and it is only when they are off the stage that the opera shows any signs of life.  In the story of “Romeo” the passion is of a far more fiery quality than in that of “Faust”; and whereas in “Faust” the passion, once aroused, remains at an even level until the finale, where it becomes a little more intense, in “Romeo” it is passion which gradually amounts to a tremendous climax in the Balcony scene, and in the Bedroom scene is strangely blended with chilly forebodings of death.  The Mozartean method did not permit Gounod to depict these metamorphoses and blendings of feeling.  Mozart himself would have been hard pressed to do it; and, for want of the only method that might have enabled Gounod to do it,—­the Wagnerian method of continuous development of typical themes,—­the unfolding of the drama hangs fire in every scene, not a scene ends at a higher pitch of feeling than it began.  The last scene of all, the scene where a more sincere composer would have made his most stupendous effect, demanded at least sympathy with emotions for which Gounod at no time showed the slightest sympathy.  He could give us the erotic fervour with which Romeo looks death in the eyes, but the mood preceding and indeed leading up to that fervour he could not give us—­the mood which finds the world barren, ugly, and so repellent that death itself appears beautiful by comparison, the mood to which Christianity makes its strongest appeal.  But it was not the subject which led to Gounod’s failure in “Romeo and Juliet.”  He failed in every opera excepting “Faust,” and he failed because, lacking perfect sincerity and perfect knowledge of his own powers, he endeavoured to express feelings he had never experienced, in a form which he would have felt at once to be inadequate had he experienced them for ever so brief a moment.  As Gounod failed in “Romeo,” and failed in every other opera, so every modern composer who tries to treat dramatic subjects in the old undramatic form has failed, and will fail.  The Italian opera was well enough for the purpose it was devised to serve; but as soon as composers seek to put strenuous action, elaborately worked-out situations, and the gradual growth and change of human passion into it, we feel that there must be a lack of artistic sincerity somewhere.  Italian opera may offer all these things, the things that the age wants in its opera, but it can never be sincere in offering them, and art is the one place where insincerity is intolerable.