Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/220

 No educated man worthy of the name will deny that there exists a classical French language which became fixed in the period of Malherbe, Pascal, Descartes, and the foundation of the Academy, and which has remained essentially unchanged ever since. The most recent in date of our good writers wrote it, or are still writing it. It shines in all the brilliance of its purity in Renan, Anatole France, Lemaître. The common doctrine of the great writers is that everything can be expressed in this admirable language, that there is no subtlety so fine that it cannot be rendered by it in luminous characters, when it is well handled: and that what one cannot, even by twisting it, make it say is not worth saying. The intellects for whom that language does not suffice, should blame some impotence, some deformity of their own thought. Whenever, in the last three centuries it has served as instrument to a new genius (I am speaking of real, not sham genius, a human and universally intelligible genius, not the presiding genius of a literary sect) it has recovered, has this old language of Bossuet and Voltaire, aspects of wonderful youth. What style gives contemporaries a more attractive impression of novelty than Renan's?—and he is thoroughly classical at any rate in his finest passages. Whereas the "writing audacities" of naturalism and impressionism, which in the eyes of competent critics were old at birth, are to-day as everyone admits utterly decayed.

An analogous state of things exists in music. There is a classical musical language. Its fixation has been more progressive and has taken a longer time to attain its realisation, but none the less it was completed a long time ago. It is the language that Rameau, Couperin,