Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/69

 papers of the writer Houdar de la Motte, who was known as a successful librettist. Rameau, who was thinking of trying a theatrical venture, asks him for a "book," and seeks to inspire his confidence.

"When people speak of a learned musician," he writes, "they mean usually a man who has the various combinations of notes at his fingers' ends, but he is supposed to be so much absorbed in these combinations that he sacrifices everything to them,—good sense, sentiment, judgment, reason. Now such a man is merely a school musician, and of a school that deals with notes and nothing else; and one may rightly prefer a musician who prides himself less on knowledge than on taste. And yet the latter, whose taste is only formed by comparisons that are within reach of his sensations, can at the best only excel in certain directions—I mean by that in directions that correspond to his temperament. Is he naturally tender? Then he expresses tenderness. Is his temper quick, lively, jocular?—His music follows suit. But take him out of these characters that are natural to him and you would not know him again. Moreover as he draws on his imagination for everything without any help from art in its relation to expression, he ends by exhausting himself. At the first kindling he blazed brilliantly, but the fire is diminishing every time he tries to re-light it, and one soon finds in him nothing but repetitions or platitudes. What one should seek therefore, for the theatre, is a musician who has studied nature before painting her and who by his knowledge has been able to choose colours and shades the relation of which with the required expressions is borne in upon him by his judgment and taste … Nature has not entirely denied me her gifts, and I have not