Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/38

 everything must be taken, from them everything must proceed,—the courses, contours, and ornaments of the musical edifice. In other words, instrumental music is, as regards its form, the offspring of the Fugue. It is the fugue freed from its formal servitude, its scholastic heaviness, but preserving its essential features under this greatly extended variety and liberty. It is the marriage of the fugue with passion. The fact of its being thus subject to the action of strict and rational rules makes up for all the lack of definite nessdefiniteness [sic] that it may have from the point of view of expression. While the force of Lyric impulse, of dynamic life which is communicated to it by the heart and blood of the musician touches the heart of the hearer and stirs his blood, the marvellous regularity of its structure contents his intelligence. This more intellectual element, which seems to be a necessary adjunct to music, is represented in other cases by words or by dance figures. Instrumental music contains it in itself, and supplies it or supplements it by the severe laws of arrangement by which it confines itself.

From this one may conclude that compared with other branches of music there is something artificial in its nature, and that its appeal will always be, more or less, to the initiated. But this observation in no way lessens the value of its masterpieces.

If Grétry had lived a little later, and had seen the great modern expansion of the symphony, he would no doubt have enriched his principles with complements and correctives approximating to those which I have ventured to add, which would have made them true of music in general, as they are of vocal music. In their application to the latter they seem to me to