through it all;[73] we have Greeks in patches and powder, Monseigneur Achille and Princesse Iphigénie behave with becoming courtesy and gallantry, and even the artistic representation is made subordinate to the ceremonial. But Gluck had been trained among these impressions, the forms were not irksome to him, and the greatness of his artistic individuality is nowhere more plainly seen than in his power of exhibiting at momentous crises the purely human and poetic emotions stripped of their outward disguise, and reflecting the ideal spirit of antique art by means of music in a way of which the poet had never dreamed. Gluck did not venture to depart from the national form of the versification; he was well aware that he must yield to the demands of French taste if he wished to influence the French on his main points. He not only strove to conform to external conditions, as, for instance, to the great extension of the ballet,[74] endeavouring to turn them to his own ends; he carefully studied the language, in order to declaim it and treat it musically in a way suitable to its character; he also eagerly studied the operas of his predecessors, Lully and Rameau, that he might adopt all that was truly and genuinely national in them. The influence of these studies may be recognised even in details; but Gluck turned to account whatever he adopted in a perfectly free and independent manner, and developed it still further. His most important innovation was the substitution of free Italian recitative, with the grand capabilities for characteristic expression given to it by Gluck himself, for the old "psalmodie." He changed throughout the fundamental character of the musical representation, and here he had no predecessors; for the treatment of the several parts of the composition after the Italian style, comic opera had, as we have seen, in some degree prepared the way. A {PERFORMANCE OF "IPHIGÉNIE," 1774.} (29) further advance, brought about by the greater vividness of the dramatic impersonations, was the cultivation of ensemble pieces; but this, as has been already remarked, is the weakest side of Gluck's performances.