Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/70

 devoted myself to combinations of notes to the extent of forgetting their intimate connection with natural beauty."

The style of this passage is somewhat involved, but its sense is clear and strong, and its application singularly large. Let us put beside it this passage taken from the Treatise on Harmony:

"A good musician should throw himself into all the characters that he seeks to depict, and, like a clever actor, put himself in the speaker's place; he should imagine that he is in the places where the different events happen that he seeks to represent, and take the same share in them as the characters chiefly concerned; and he must be a good elocutionist at any rate internally."

These fine sentences remove, not only as regards Rameau himself, but generally, a prejudice that is too widely entertained against the intelligence of musicians. You will find many people quite ready to believe that genius of musical creation or interpretation is compatible with a poor development of this faculty, that a man may be a first class musician without having brains. That is almost a commonplace. But it is a profound mistake. At any rate this idea is no more true for music than for other arts. In so far as it is true at all it applies to all alike. In all ages one may find poets, painters and sculptors who combined with real talent a quite ordinary brain, occasionally even a weak one, lacking judgment and finding room for nonsense and fatuity. But such talent has always been of a petty kind, and has not gone far; it draws on a very limited capital; it has so to speak only one note, and having once produced it is condemned to repeat it constantly whatever the