Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/59

 fixation of its vocabulary, the clarity and precision of its general terms, the firmness of its syntax, the admirable regularity of its constructions, the perfection of its rhythms, classical French far surpasses the French of the preceding periods as an organ of reason, an instrument of poetry and eloquence. Well, there is likewise in music a classical style, a language of Bossuet. And if Rameau is not the first to have understood the constitutive conditions, the natural laws, the essential mechanism of this language, in which have been written the greatest and most permanent masterpieces, at least it was he who mastered them most completely and most in the manner of a philosopher, who best co-ordinated and deduced them, and who showed most intellectual mastery in attempting (with some success) their synthesis.

The technical doctrine of Rameau is set forth in the Treatise on Harmony reduced to its Natural Principle which appeared in 1722 and in Harmonic Generation, issued in 1737. These are Rameau's two principal theoretical works. They find their complement in a long series of dissertations and monographs published from year to year in reply to criticisms, to clear up or to develop points on which discussion had arisen. The whole is written in a firm and strong style, but the argument is often close even to obscurity, and overloaded to the extent of being too complicated, and the study of Rameau's ideas would be a truly severe exercise, were one obliged to undertake it from his own text. Happily we are spared this by the work of d'Alembert who in his Elements of Theoretical