Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/95

 of his contemporaries. Their dreams have found an interpreter in him—dreams of life according to Nature, of pastoral innocence, of charm in sensual joys, of grace and lightness in passion, of happiness through the daintiness and radiation of pleasure. This moral and poetical ideal is reflected in his works with the same sweetness and light as in the paintings of Watteau and Fragonard. Does it follow that he was personally led captive, or intimately imbued with this ideal, that he was subject to the sentiments and desires that he clothed with such beautiful expression, that he yielded himself up to them, and shared the intoxication of them? Here a fine distinction must be made. In temperament as in brain, Rameau belongs to another period. He is a bourgeois of the old school, positive and severe, of Cartesian education, the very last man to run after sentimental will o' the wisps and idyllic illusions. In that lofty and firm soul there is no nook for pastorals. But he is a very great artist with a quick and piercing eye, quick at probing the meaning of what lies around him, seizing passionately its appeal and grace, transforming it into rich material for his art, and appreciating it rather with the heart than the intellect. One might compare him to one of those great painters, of whom France has had many, who have come to Paris from their villages, and there, in the midst of their fame have preserved (not without a whimsical satisfaction) their rough peasant ways, the burrs of the backwoods—and yet they have had no equals for realising on canvas the poetry of supreme elegance in woman. So stands Rameau to the idyllism of the eighteenth century. It is a barbaric error (and the barbarism comes from Germany), that of a certain contemporary school,