Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/37

 vague imitation. In this quality of vagueness Grétry at first found a reason for despising this branch of music, but he came to realise that it was not a valid reason. And we, who know not only Haydn but Mozart and Beethoven as well, know that, as treated by them, instrumental music has produced master. piecesmasterpieces [sic] equalling in beauty the purest masterpieces of other arts. We have no doubt on that point. But then, how are we to get rid of the strange difficulty which that certainty raises for us, the downright aesthetic scandal or as a German would say, the shocking antinomy established by the existence of this fact—an artistic form at once capable of the highest beauty and essentially vague? Do not reason, taste, and the example of all the other arts teach us that there can be no beauty except in precision?

The scandal is dispersed, the antinomy resolved, if we remark that side by side with its expressive and pathetic element, instrumental music includes another quite different,—an element which performs a part exactly analogous to that of words in relation to vocal music or the dance in relation to dance music. I refer to the peculiarities of its construction which are subject to laws of a rigour only comparable (by analogy) to those governing the models of classic architecture. If in order to be beautiful, instrumental music demands (as it does) great vitality of inspiration, and powerful lyric force, on the other hand nothing can be less capricious than its developments. The latter run between lines whose curve, determined at the outset by the musician's fancy, cannot afterwards be changed. Once the initial ideas, the generative themes (always simple and short with the classical masters) have been laid down, no others can be introduced. From them