Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/101

 authenticity of the Seer has given rise, and of the solutions that have been found, I venture to state as a certainty that some professional musician or other must have set his hand to this work to make it capable of rendition, but that its happiest and most characteristic melodies are the work of Jean-Jacques. Nature had not denied him a certain gift of melodic invention. He could invent pretty airs of a sentimental, simple and rustic turn. But he was assuredly incapable of embodying his ideas in a composition of wider scope. He had no musical education. He had never worked. He had read Rameau's Treatise with sufficient care to be able to give an approximately correct summary of it in some articles of the Encyclopaedia, but this could not make up for his lack of practical apprenticeship. For want of such apprenticeship not only did he not know how to compose, but the very notion of musical composition had remained a stranger to him. On that he had only the most superficial, puny, and even false ideas. The terms in which he speaks of Philidor's collaboration would be enough to prove it. To talk of accompaniments as drudgery is a scandal, a gross heresy. With all his gift as a melodist, Jean-Jacques was not only no musician; he was not in reality even a judge of the art, or an expert to be taken seriously. But that was not going to stop him from treating of it very doctorally in his Letter on French Music, in which he issues in a tone of resounding decision and oracular authority the decrees of his own incompetence.

The execution at La Popelinière's house—an execution in both senses of the word-had taken place in 1744. The great attack upon Rameau was made in 1752. The comparatively long interval between these