There would seem to be in an oratorio something essentially germane to the English mind and character. The sounding recitative and swelling hymns, the rolling choruses and triumphant bursts of exultant music, have a strange affinity with the solemn, earnest, energetic English people, slow to move to anger or to love, but, when moved, passionately enthusiastic in their love, bloody and terrible in their great wrath. The French can no more understand oratorios than they can understand blank verse. I remember going to see Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” once in Paris. It was winter time, and the performances took place in Franconi’s great, windy, for-summer-built horse-riding circus in the Champs Elysées. The band and chorus shivered as they scraped and sang; the _prima donna’s_ nose and lips were blue, and the music paper quivered in her hand; the _contralto_ looked exquisitely uncomfortable at not having to wear a page’s dress and show her legs. As for the audience, the ladies sat muffled up in shawls and furs—it was a morning performance—and whispered among themselves; the men sucked the knobs of their canes, twirled their moustaches, stared up at the chandeliers, and murmured, _Quelle drôle de musique_! They didn’t repeat that oratorio, and I don’t wonder at it. To the French it was neither fish nor flesh, neither ecclesiastical nor secular. If the first, they might argue, give us the chanting priests, the swinging censers dispensing fragrant clouds, the red-cassocked altar boys, the twinkling tapers, the embroidered canopies, and the swelling pæans of the concealed choristers. If the last, let us have a drinking chorus, a laughing chorus, and a dagger chorus, a _prima donna_ to make her entrance on horseback, a _contralto_ in tights, a ballet in the second act, and some red fire at the end. But this is neither mass nor opera.