Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/56

 ties were not rationally classified, exactly defined, or traced to their true origins. They were presented diffusely and without connection, or else grouped in a purely empirical fashion. To Rameau this belated condition of theory was intolerable. He could not rest till he had resettled it, or, to speak more correctly, constituted it properly. For him the re-casting of principles was the only path to creation. Some might (I do not myself) contest the accuracy of his ideas on the primordial function of harmony in musical composition. But the world has accepted his explanation of the laws and rules of harmony. It has become classical, and by classical I mean scholastic.

We may compare him on the one hand to Malherbe and on the other to Descartes. His reform partakes of the spirit of both these great men. Rameau resembles Malherbe in being an artist who aspires to define the general conditions of purity and greatness in style. He resembles Descartes because these conditions depend essentially on the conduct of harmony, and harmony rests on physical and mathematical causes which have to be fixed and co-ordinated. The son of the Dijon organist was dowered from his cradle with the genius of art and the genius of science. Of these two gifts, the first was undoubtedly the stronger, but so far from stifling or ousting the other, it actually stimulated it, by providing, nay imposing the subject of its application. The material of Rameau's studies is the physics and mathematics of sonorous beauty. I have compared him to Descartes and Malherbe. It is exactly the same comparison as was made by the greatest critic of the century, Voltaire, when he called him "our Euclid-Orpheus."

I try to write in a manner that can be understood