Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/43

 labour of another sort, and one has no certainty that it will have any result. I quote the gist of his remark, a singularly valuable one, and one by which our contemporaries might profit greatly. "Twelve bars of harmony" is as a technical expression no doubt sufficiently vague, but there is no doubt about the meaning. Grétry has in his mind the result attained by work of development and combination. Are we to believe that he treats work of this kind with contempt? If so, he would certainly be wrong, for musical composition cannot do without it, and he himself suffers from the difficulties that are apt to arise through not having the mastery of this kind of work it is his own weak point. On the other hand it is one of the peculiarities of musical technique that it offers a thousand resources for developments produced as it were in a vacuum, that contain no idea worth the trouble of developing and for combinations of sounds and formulæ that can be multiplied and refined indefinitely, without any need, I should say without any real impulse, of inspiration and of life. It is very human that Grétry should look for compensation for his own deficiencies in gleefully drawing attention to this possibility, which some musicians of his time abused. But what would he have said had he lived in our day! What would he have said had he known such and such contemporary musicians, honourably ambitious but never scoring a bull's eye, who overwhelm us, crush us in masterly fashion through an hour of symphony or five acts of opera, not (as the worthy public supposes) by "abuse of learning" but because their expenditure of "learning" lacks any reason for existence, being prompted neither by inventive power, nor intensity of feeling, nor the pressure of any living force within