Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/106

people who deserve it, and it is perhaps the worst reproach one can incur. But very often also it is the alibi under which a taste too mediocre, too clumsy and too little sensitive to seize the sense of a rich and delicately expressive music, hides itself and seeks its revenge. Then it cries down pedantry and the abuse of science, it cries down the fugue. After all it is surprising to find Jean-Jacques making himself the mouthpiece of this lack of understanding, this semi-inertia of feeling, and upsetting all the accepted notions of art merely to set up such a disposition as the real judge and sovereign umpire of good music. Is he sincere? It was quite recently that he had admired the Indes galantes as containing more harmony than all the Italian operas put together." Now this harmony has become for him " emphasis on harmonic science." But let us not embark on the question of sincerity in the case of Jean-Jacques! The fact is that what he, aided by his obsession and craze, finds charming in the music of the opéra-bouffe is (side by side with the undoubted delicacy of some of its examples) its decadent tendencies. For there is a decadence of Italian music which begins at this period, a decadence destined to last a very long time, to be brilliant, and have its masterpieces and its examples of genius, only finally to lead the music of Italy to the state of perdition in which we find it at the present day. Of what does this decadence consist? Of impoverishment of writing and of musical style, of the emancipation of melody, which henceforth ceases to attach itself to the fine shades of truth and expression, and is concerned only with the sensual pleasures of the bel canto That is what Rousseau exalts in opposition to Rameau, and I