Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/71

 subject chosen. When the note is too obviously ill-tuned to the subject, all such a talent can do is to force it, it can never find a fresh one. The terms employed by Rameau admirably characterise the trivial merits and huge inadequacy of talent without mental power. The fact that these terms are so general as to be applicable, as they stand and without any change whatever, to all arts can only strengthen their special authority in respect to music. The primordial virtue of good music is truth of expression, fidelity to nature. And, as Rameau says, the study of nature is not comprised within the special study of music; the sense of the exact relation between the thing to be expressed musically and the formula of sound which will express it is a sense which a merely musical education does not give, and which one may say calls for the accuracy of the whole of a man's thought. There have been no truly great musicians who have not added to the special gifts of their art the capacity to ponder over humanity, human situations and human passions, in other words who have not possessed a generally superior brain. But it is abundantly clear that it is precisely those who have at their command a stock of the most extended, varied and richly shaded impressions, who have needed to wield the richest musical language and the resources of the most powerful and subtle technique. Power and delicacy of feeling do not render technical mastery and fertility unnecessary; on the contrary they call for their highest development.

Such are Rameau's principles. They are admirable. They would still be so if he had lacked strength to apply them effectively in his own works. But in truth this hypothesis is contradictory. Rameau's