unrestrained invasion of musical Italianism and afterwards of Germanism, it was he who was the great promoter and prophet of this betrayal. That falsest of ideas, the idea that Nature has refused to Frenchmen the gift of expressing themselves in music, comes from the citizen of Geneva. Let us reflect for a moment on what this idea implies. It assumes in effect that the universal qualities of reason, taste and feeling as employed by the French in literature and the other arts, cannot find employment in music, that there is some natural incompatibility between these superior qualities and music. That would be a serious inferiority for music. But let us be reassured; to attribute this inferiority to music, as Jean-Jacques implicitly did, is a calumny.
By a sequence of ideas which has nothing contradictory in it, Jean-Jacques, while denying to the French the faculty of musical expression, exalted to excess the spirit of musical nationalism in other nations. He spoke of Italian music as an independent plant which had everything to gain in growth and beauty by keeping itself absolutely untouched by the breath of the outside world, and which must provide entirely for its own nourishment and development if it would not spoil its fruits. But if that is true of Italian music the same must logically be said of German music, Russian music, and the music of every nation. And thus we see the destruction of that common spirit, that great common style of the older European music, of which Mozart and Beethoven still furnish examples, and of which the dissolution was to occur at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Jean-Jacques was the active worker of this ruin. And it is, I should say, very significant that. the same murderous blows
