Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/36

to dig out and render explicit before the musical work can display all its brilliance, all its meaning. There we have a theory which may rightly be thought rash. The idea of setting words to the instrumental music of the masters is chimerical, and if tried would I think give worse than odd results. But there is in this proposal, singular as it is in itself, an element of reason, a basis of just observation. Grétry sees very clearly that the inspiration of symphonists worthy of the name of creators does not well up or form itself in a vacuum. It is the birth of a sentiment, an emotion, an image, a vision which occupies the musician’s mind, which sets in movement and warms his imagination and acts for him as the interior model which he struggles to reproduce in his musical ideas. This is of course a well known fact in psychology, almost self-evident, and confirmed by what the masters have confided to others of their method of work. The conclusion is clear; instrumental like all other music is imitative. Where it differs from vocal and dance music is that as the object imitated is not in any way explained or presented separately, we do not recognise it. It remains indistinct. The meaning of the music is clearly defined for its composer, but not for us who hear it. As a proof, if we bid five literary men, presumed to be of equal intelligence and sensibility, to depict the sentiments expressed in the symphony in C minor, or any other symphony of Beethoven, we shall get five versions,—not contradictory versions certainly, but quite distinct. Everybody recognises easily whether the state of mind reflected in a piece of music is cheerful or sad, agitated or calm, but that still leaves a wide margin for the indeterminate and vague. Instrumental music is