Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/84

72 understand the reasons which their contempories had for their preferences. Without speaking of the individual value of these artists, which is often very great, it is their spirit which leads the way to the classic masterpieces of the close of the eighteenth century. J. S. Bach and Händel are two mountains which dominate but close a period. Telemann, Hasse, Jommelli and the Mannheim symphonists are the rivers which have made for themselves a way towards the future. As these rivers have poured themselves into greater rivers—Mozart, Beethoven,—which have absorbed them, we have forgotten them while still beholding the lofty summits in the distance. But we must be grateful to the innovators. They were full of vitality once and they have handed it down to us.

The reader will remember the famous quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, inaugurated in France towards the close of the seventeenth century by Charles Perrault and Fontenelle, who opposed to the imitation of antiquity the Cartesian ideal of progress, revived, twenty years later, by Houdar de la Motte, in the name of reason and of modern taste.

This quarrel extended beyond the personality of those who began it. It corresponded with a universal movement of European thought; and we find similar symptoms in all the greater western countries and in all the arts. They are strikingly apparent in German music. The generation of Keiser, Telemann and Mattheson felt from childhood an instinctive aversion from those who represented antiquity in music, for the contrapuntists and