Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/276

246 we call beautiful whatever has a brilliant colour. Denis the Carthusian tries to apply these standards, but he hardly succeeds: applied æsthetics are seldom successful. When the idea, of beauty is so highly intellectualized, it is not surprising that the mind passes at once from earthly beauty to that of the angels and of the empyrean, or to that of abstract conceptions. There was no place, in this system, for the notion of artistic beauty, not even in connection with music, the effects of which, one would have supposed, could not fail to suggest the idea of beauty of a specific character.

Musical sensation was immediately absorbed in religious feeling. It would never have occurred to Denis that he might admire in music or painting any other beauty than that of holy things themselves.

One day, on entering the church of Saint John at Bois-le-Duo, while the organ was playing, he was instantly transported by the melody into a prolonged ecstasy.

Denis was one of those who objected to introducing the new polyphonous music into the church. Breaking the voice (fractio vocis), he says, seems to be the sign of a broken soul; it is like curled hair in a man or plaited garments in a woman: vanity, and nothing else. He does not mean that there are not devout people whom melody stimulates into contemplation, therefore the Church is right in tolerating organs; but he disapproves of artistic music which only serves to charm those who hear it, and especially to amuse the women. Certain people who practised singing in melodic parts assured him they experienced a certain pleasurable pride, and even a sort of lasciviousness of the heart (lascivia animi). In other words, to describe the exact nature of musical emotion the only terms he can find are those denoting dangerous sins.

From the earlier Middle Ages onward many treatises on the æsthetics of music were written, but these treatises, con- structed according to the musical theories of antiquity, which were no longer understood, teach us little about the way in which the men of the Middle Ages really enjoyed music. In analysing musical beauty, fifteenth-century writers do not get beyond the vagueness and naïveness which also characterized their admiration of painting. Just as, in giving expression