to social pressure, marry Amneris, and throw over Aida, or yield to passion, fly with Aida, and throw over his country.  All this shows the bad influence of Scribe, who usually spent half his books in explaining matters as simple and obvious as the reason for eating one’s breakfast.  Verdi knew this as well as anyone, and used the two first acts as opportunities for stage display.  For “Aida” was written to please the Khedive of Egypt; and Verdi, always keenly commercial, probably knew his man.  Now, when the masters of opera—­Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Weber—­got hold of a bad book, they nearly invariably “faked” it by getting swiftly over the weak points and dwelling on the strong; and, above all, they flooded the whole thing with a stream of delicious melody that hypnotises one, and for the time puts fault-finding out of the question.  Not so Verdi.  He wrote to please his audience, and he knew that what one can only call dark-skinned local colour was still fresh in spite of “L’Africaine,” and that the vulgar would find delight in a blaze of glaring banners and showy spectacle.  So he set the two first acts as they stood, trusting to local colour and spectacle to make them popular; and, as we know, at the time they were popular, and the populace exalted Verdi far above such second-rate fellows as Mozart and Beethoven.  But now, when local colour has been done to death, and when it has had a quarter of a century to bleach out of Verdi’s canvases, what remains to interest, I do not say to touch, one?  Certainly not the expression of Radames’ or Aida’s love, for here as everywhere Verdi fails to communicate any new phase of emotion, but (precisely as he did in “Falstaff” and “Otello”) has written music which indicates that he had some inkling of the emotion of the scene, and could write strains calculated not to prevent the scene making its effect.  That Verdi has no well-spring of original feeling, perhaps explains why he is so poor in the scenes with Radames, Amneris, and Aida. (Also, perhaps, it explains why he has fallen back in his best period upon masterpieces of dramatic art for his librettos.  It is almost outside human possibility to add anything to “Falstaff” or “Otello”; and such success as Verdi has made with them is the result of writing what is, after all, only glorified incidental music—­music which accompanies the play.  To class these accompaniments with the masterpieces of original opera is surely the most startling feat of modern musical criticism.) Moreover, the plan of writing each scene in a series of detached numbers—­for, even where song might flow naturally into song, the two are quite detached—­breaks up the interest as effectually as it does in “Traviata”; and the songs do not themselves interest.  Verdi’s music is not based, like the masters’, upon the inflexions of the human voice under stress of sincere feeling, but upon figures and passages easily executed upon certain instruments.  The great composers strove to make instruments speak in the accent of the