Gounod has been blamed for violating the reverence due to sacred things, employing portions of the church service in this scene, instead of writing music for it.  But this is the last resort of critical hostility, seeking a peg on which to hang objection.  Meyerbeer’s splendid introduction of Luther’s great hymn, “Ein’ feste Burg,” in “Les Huguenots,” called forth a similar criticism from his German assailants.  Some of the most dramatic effects in music have been created by this species of musical quotation, so rich in its appeal to memory and association.  Who that has once heard can forget the thrilling power of “La Marseillaise” in Schumann’s setting of Heinrich Heine’s poem of “The Two Grenadiers”?  The two French soldiers, weary and broken-hearted after the Russian campaign, approach the German frontier.  The veterans are moved to tears as they think of their humiliated Emperor.  Up speaks one suffering with a deadly hurt to the other:  “Friend, when I am dead, bury me in my native France, with my cross of honor on my breast, and my musket in my hand, and lay my good sword by my side.”  Until this time the melody has been a slow and dirge-like stave in the minor key.  The old soldier declares his belief that he will rise again from the clods when he hears the victorious tramp of his Emperor’s squadrons passing over his grave, and the minor breaks into a weird setting of the “Marseillaise” in the major key.  Suddenly it closes with a few solemn chords, and, instead of the smoke of battle and the march of the phantom host, the imagination sees the lonely plain with its green mounds and moldering crosses.

Readers will pardon this digression illustrating an artistic law, of which Gounod has made such effective use in the church scene of his “Faust” in heightening its tragic solemnity.  The wild goblin symphony in the fifth act has added some new effects to the gamut of deviltry in music, and shows that Weber in the “Wolf’s Glen” and Meyerbeer in the “Cloisters of St. Rosalie” did not exhaust the somewhat limited field.  The whole of this part of the act, sadly mutilated and abridged often in representation, is singularly picturesque and striking as a musical conception, and is a fitting companion to the tragic prison scene.  The despair of the poor crazed Marguerite; her delirious joy in recognizing Faust; the temptation to fly; the final outburst of faith and hope, as the sense of Divine pardon sinks into her soul—­all these are touched with the fire of genius, and the passion sweeps with an unfaltering force to its climax.  These references to the details of a work so familiar as “Faust,” conveying of course no fresh information to the reader, have been made to illustrate the peculiarities of Gounod’s musical temperament, which sways in such fascinating contrast between the voluptuous and the spiritual.  But whether his accents belong to the one or the other, they bespeak a mood flushed with earnestness and fervor, and a mind which recoils from the frivolous, however graceful it may be.