Above, rises another melody, and from its simple outline grows a fervor and pathos that, aside from the basic themes of the whole work, strike the main feeling of the Finale.

[Music:  Un peu moins vite]

The martial trip from the Andante joins later in the return of the whirling rhythm.  At last the motto strikes on high, but the appealing counter-melody is not easily hushed.

[Music:  (Ob.) (Cellos with tremolo violins)]

It breaks out later in a verse of exalted beauty and passion.  The struggle of the two ideas reminds us of the Fifth Symphony.  At last the gloom of the fateful motto is relieved by the return of the original answer, and we seem to see a new source of latest ideas, so that we wonder whether all the melodies are but guises of the motto and answer, which now at the close, sing in united tones a hymn of peace and bliss.

CHAPTER IX

DEBUSSY AND THE INNOVATORS

At intervals during the course of the art have appeared the innovators and pioneers,—­rebels against the accepted manner and idiom.  The mystery is that while they seem necessary to progress they seldom create enduring works.  The shadowy lines may begin somewhere among the Huebalds and other early adventurers.  One of the most striking figures is Peri, who boldly, almost impiously, abandoned the contrapuntal style, the only one sanctioned by tradition, and set the dramatic parts in informal musical prose with a mere strumming of instruments.

It is not easy to see the precise need of such reaction.  The radical cause is probably a kind of inertia in all things human, by which the accepted is thought the only way.  Rules spring up that are never wholly true; at best they are shifts to guide the student, inadequate conclusions from past art.  The essence of an art can never be put in formulas.  Else we should be content with the verbal form.  The best excuse for the rule is that it is meant to guard the element of truth in art from meretricious pretence.

And, we must not forget, Art progresses by slow degrees; much that is right in one age could not come in an earlier, before the intervening step.

The masters, when they had won their spurs, were ever restive under rules.[A] Yet they underwent the strictest discipline, gaining early the secret of expression; for the best purpose of rules is liberation, not restraint.  On the other hand they were, in the main, essentially conservative.  Sebastian Bach clung to the older manner, disdaining the secular sonata for which his son was breaking the ground.