Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/39

 be admirably subtle, and it is interesting to see how he availed himself of them in practice, and the resources of invention which he found in them.

Music is the imitation of speech. But it could not be so if speech had not already in itself an element of music. In reality music is already latent in speech. "Speech is a sound in which song is locked up." All that is needed is to have a sufficiently fine ear to recognise the song that it contains. Speech, according to the inflexions of the sentiment that it expresses has its intervals, it rests on various points of the chromatic scale, it follows a rhythm. What is required is to give musical precision to all this, to fix and harden these intervals which exist but are not definite, to determine these points, to hold the voice on the most characteristic of them for the required length of time, to bring into prominence this rhythm. Naturally there can only be question of words that express sentiments of a nature to be set to music, sentiment already stamped with a certain lyricism, conveyed on a certain tone. Grétry found this at the Théatre Français, where he attended constantly. He used to note by a series of lines rising, falling or horizontal, the diction of the actors, and by an enlargement of his diagram, with the help of necessary thumb marks, he developed his notes into melody. These were his preliminary studies, his cartoons as it were.

Assuredly this minuteness would have been no use to him if he had not had the spirit of musical invention. But as he did possess that spirit, he found in this method of investigation a wonderful guide. It saved him effort and kept him in close touch with truth and nature. These studies of Grétry on the inflexions of speech are to his melodic inspiration what the light