Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/216

 What most markedly distinguishes these forms is their extraordinary plastic quality. The idea of musical plasticity, of trends of melody and harmony which by their picturesqueness and poetry offer a strongly significant relief and seem to stand out like sculpture in space, may seem paradoxical. The fact is that Wagner, alone indeed among German musicians of all ages, and alone of all European musicians in the nineteenth century, has realised that idea. But on the other hand there is an age and a country in which this type of music had flourished and had become familiar—the eighteenth century in France. In my study of Rameau I have already compared in this respect Rameau and Wagner, and I will not go back to it. But I would add that Rameau was only the highest and most glorious representative of a style that was once traditional and classical with us: I will not call it descriptive (the concept would be too small and narrow), but objective music, music used rather as the sonorous voice of beings and things than as the voice of the individual soul, rather as the carillon of the universe than as the essential expression of inward lyricism.

This second conception is German. According to the German aesthetes music has as its dominant and almost specific property the expression of the inward dreamland of the soul and the states through which the soul passes when closed to the world and wandering in its own bypaths. Many Frenchmen indeed have adopted with docility this Germanic idea, as they have a hundred other Germanic ideas, but the strength and health of French music have gained nothing thereby. In contrast with that conception we set the Wagnerian music as being of a different nature and