Berlioz’s music admits of no compromise. Either it must come to us or we must come to it. We have been trying ever since his death to patch up some kind of middle course. H. K. M. III As we have seen in an earlier chapter, the _opéra comique_ had developed after Boildieu into a new type, of which Auber, Hérold, Halévy, and Adam were the principal exponents. These were the men who prepared the way for the new lyric drama which grew out of the _opéra comique_--for the romantic opera of Gounod and Thomas. The romantic movement in French literature had, we may recall, received its impulse by Victor Hugo, whose _Hernani_ appeared in 1829. Its influence on French music was most powerful from 1840 on. Composers of all schools yielded to it in one way or another, from Berlioz, who followed the ideals of Gluck, to Halévy, whose _Jaguarita l’Indienne_ pictures romance in the tropics. The direct result of this influence of literary romanticism was the creation of the _drame lyrique_. Yet it must not be thought that Thomas and Gounod deliberately created the _drame lyrique_ as a distinct operatic form. Auber and others of his school had already produced operas which may justly lay claim to the titles of lyric dramas. And the earlier works of both Thomas and Gounod themselves were light in character. In fact, Thomas’ _La double échelle_ and _Le Perruquier de la Régence_ are _opéras comique_ of the accepted type; and _Le Caïd_ has received the somewhat doubtful compliment of being considered ‘a precursor of the Offenbach torrent of _opéra bouffe_.’ In Gounod’s _Médecin malgré lui_, wherein he anticipated Richard Strauss and Wolf-Ferrari in choosing a Molière comedy for operatic treatment, the composer achieved a success. Yet this opera, as well as that charming modernization of a classic legend, _Philemon et Baucis_, both adhere strictly to the conventional lines of _opéra comique_. Gounod’s _Faust_ remains the epochal work of his career. His _Sapho_ (1851) never achieved popularity, but is of interest because it foreshadows his later style in its departure from tradition; in the final scene he ‘struck a note of sensuous melancholy new to French opera.’ Adam (in his capacity as a music critic) even claimed that in _Sapho_ Gounod was trying to revive Gluck’s system of musical declamation.