Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/61

 of Newton. The discoveries and systems of Rameau on harmonic properties and their "generation," on the physical and mathematical reasons of musical enjoyment, profited by this curiosity. But the glory which the author derived from them could not but be of a somewhat austere kind, like that of the great logicians who bring mankind more enlightenment than pleasure.

Who could have believed that he was not destined to content himself with this glory, and that he was preparing to achieve in addition the more enviable fame won by the creators of pleasure, the favourites of Apollo? Who could have believed that those thirty years of a life so laboriously spent had been merely the preface of his life, and that he was to enter, when over fifty years of age, on the most brilliant and splendid phase of his career, and reveal himself as one of the greatest poetical discoverers of modern times? It was indeed when he was more than fifty, at the end of the year 1733, that Rameau decided on a theatrical venture and brought out his first opera, Hippolyte and Aricie, the first ring in that marvellous chain which includes the Indes galantes, Castor and Pollux, Dardanus, the Fêtes de Polymnie, Pygmalion, Plotée, to name only the finest links. Was it not madness to venture at that age into a field where only youth and force of imagination can prevail? A symbolist might say that it was not the first folly of the kind in the artist's life. At forty-two he had married a girl of eighteen. He had had no reason to regret it and she had borne him a charming daughter. At fifty, we find him giving himself to the embraces of the Muse, and receiving from her inspirations equal to those of the greatest composers, and some of them, to my thinking, superior to anything to be found in music.