Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/277

Rh to the latter, they only praise the lofty character of the treatment and the perfect rendering of nature, so in music only sacred dignity and imitative ingenuity are appreciated. To the medieval spirit, musical emotion quite naturally took the form of an echo of celestial joy. “For music”—says the honest rhetorician Molinet, a great lover of music, like Charles the Bold—“is the resonance of the heavens, the voice of the angels, the joy of paradise, the hope of the air, the organ of the Church, the song of the little birds, the recreation of all gloomy and despairing hearts, the persecution and driving away of the devils.” The ecstatic character of musical emotion, of course, did not escape them. “The power of harmony”— says Pierre d’Ailly—“is such that it withdraws the soul from other passions and from cares, nay, from itself.”

The high valuation of the imitative element in art entailed graver dangers for music than for painting. Composition of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries really suffered from the craze for naturalistic music, such as the caccia (whence English “catch”), originally representing a hunt with baying and yelping hounds and blowing horns. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, a pupil of Josquin de Prés, Jannequin, composed several “Inventions” of this stamp, representing, amongst others, the battle of Marignano, the street-cries of Paris, the singing of birds and the chattering of women. Fortunately, the musical inspiration of the epoch was far too rich and alive to be enslaved by such an artificial theory; the masterpieces of Dufay, Binchois or Okeghem are free from imitative tricks.

Substituting for beauty the notions of measure, order and appropriateness offered a very defective explanation of it. One other means at least satisfied deeper æsthetic instincts: the reduction of beauty to the sensation of light and splendour. To define the beauty of spiritual things, Denis the Carthusian always compares them to light. Wisdom, science, art, are so many luminous essences, illuminating the mind by their brightness.

This tendency to explain beauty by light sprang from a strongly marked predilection of the medieval mind. When we leave definitions of the idea of beauty aside, and examine the æsthetic sense of the epoch in its spontaneous expres-