Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/92

 style belonging to European music that still shews traces of the seventeenth century. But I should like to draw attention to another analogy, more interesting and more instructive.

Rameau wrote operas largely blended with symphony. His symphonies are inspired by mythological and fabulous scenes, and these scenes it is their object to illustrate and bring to life in music. Now since his time there has been one other great musician, and only one, whose work presents precisely this aspect, and who has made the same kind of application of music. I mean Richard Wagner. Their mythologies are different. Rameau's mythology is borrowed from classic fable: the models of the figures who appear in it, of the landscapes in which the events take place, have been imagined and elaborated by the painters of Rome and Venice, so that it wears the halo of a long heritage of beauty. Wagnerian mythology is taken from German and Scandinavian fable, of which one may at least say (without of course refusing to recognise its attraction) that it comes nowhere near Greek fable either in taste or in intellectual appeal; and the scenic realisations of this element of the marvellous are far coarser and very far from adjusting themselves to the same degree of style. Nevertheless the work of the two composers belongs to branches of the art sufficiently similar to render somewhat ridiculous those critics who delight in the theatrical figures of Wagner, and relish in them the freshness of Nature, while they condemn those of Rameau as artificial and class them with all that is old fashioned and cast-off in art. Would they suggest that the Rhine maidens are a less artificial conception than Diana and her