According to Grétry, music is an imitative art. He lays this down with the utmost decision. His thesis will certainly be received as the height of paradox by numerous minds who have trained themselves to think that on the contrary, music is not an imitative art and that its place is beside those arts such as architecture or geometry which create or compose forms without natural models. Painting and statuary reproduce before the eyes visible objects. Poetry reproduces human sentiments, objects which are invisible but clearly defined. What objects does music reproduce? What are the models that sound-forms imitate? Our author proceeds to tell us.
Music is the imitation of the spoken word. It is, indeed, the imitation of sentiment, but of sentiment as manifested and incorporated in the spoken word. It imitates sentiment in the inflexions of language and of speech, in which it finds its natural expression. It imitates the natural movement and rhythm of utterance. It imitates them with a heightening effect, adding accent, force, intensity, and a great increase of pathos and feeling. Therein lies its true aim. But it follows them faithfully, models itself on them. Between sung and spoken speech there is the same kind of relation as between the enlargement of a diagram and the diagram itself, or better still, between a drawing picked out with colour and an uncoloured drawing. Song is a higher power of speech, but it is not substantially something other than speech. It is speech raised to its highest degree of expressive power, of penetrating force. One sees of course that Grétry has in view what song ought to be, what it is with musicians who follow truth and nature, not with bad musicians from whom the facility of
