Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/94

 In any case the comparison is confined to these figures of sound. The methods by which the two masters develop them are as different as possible. We realise easily what an immense gulf lies between them as far as the dramatic aspect and human expression are concerned:—the same gulf which is seen to separate the heroes of noblest poetic and literary origin who fill Rameau's theatre, and the colossal but scarcely living figures, half men and half elements, which furnish the characters of the Wagnerian dramas.

Work such as Rameau's belongs not merely to the history of Music. It has its place in the general history of Taste, in the history of Civilisation. Considered from this point of view, the author of Castor appears to us as one of the most imposing figures in art that France has ever produced. A harmonious quality of nature, or one might better say, of formation, unites in his personality the features of two great periods, the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century. From the seventeenth he draws the tone of pride, grandeur, nobility, the vigour and rhetorical fulness, which form the most striking feature of his style; also his dominant concern for clarity, precision, fixity, and symmetrical order of form; also the learning that exacts a kind of exactitude and mathematical perfection in the realisation of beauty; also, and lastly, the dignity of tragic tone which he assumes without effort at the right moment. All these features affiliate him rather to Bossuet, Descartes, and Racine than to Voltaire. But in one point he is unique; that is that he contrived in that language which has the grandeur of another century (a century far superior in respect of art) to express his own century. He has conveyed into his music the sensibility and imagination