Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/96

 who maintain that an artist must identify himself with the spiritual conditions that he translates—that he must experience them within himself, in a sense "live" them. On the contrary he must dominate them, must see them from a height; only thus can he sound them deeply and get out of them what they contain of general humanity. It is in this higher way, with this independence and serenity, that Rameau, as it seems to me, shared the sensibility of his age. It is just in that that he was a great poet. He was the great poet that music gave to the eighteenth century, a century which according to a commonly received (and indeed true) opinion could find none in literature.

Rameau gained for himself this high place because in the midst of that delightful century he retained the stamp of a stronger age.

I come now to Rameau's enemies and the campaign waged against him by Rousseau, Diderot, and Grimm, the encyclopaedic party. Later we find Rousseau quarrelling with the enclopaedists, but at this period there was ostensibly a warm friendship between him and them.

This war was not the first that Rameau had had to undergo. At the time of his first appearance in the theatrical world he had found himself vigorously attacked by the party of Lulli. It was just the hostility of old Corneille's partisans against young Racine over again.

Every great artist has at first been confronted with this resistance from a public that is shocked by the