singers.  The great quarrel at once broke out as to the true method and destination of musical composition.  Is music an independent art, appealing directly to a special sense, or is it to be made an instrument for expressing affections of the mind in a certain deeper way?  The Italians asked only for delicious harmonies and exquisite melodies.  The French insisted that these should be subordinate to the work of the poet.  The former were content with delight, the latter pressed for significance.  The one declared that Italian music was no better than a silly tickling of the ears; the other that the overture to a French opera was like a prelude to a Miserere in plain-song.  In 1772-73 the illustrious Gluck came to Paris.  His art was believed to reconcile the two schools, to have more melody than the old French style, and more severity and meaning than the purely Italian style.  French dignity was saved.  But soon the old battle, which had been going on for twenty years, began to rage with greater violence than ever.  Piccini was brought to Paris by the Neapolitan ambassador.  The old cries were heard in a shriller key than before.  Pamphlets, broadsheets, sarcasms flew over Paris from every side.

Was music only to flatter the ear, or was it to paint the passions in all their energy, to harrow the soul, to raise men’s courage, to form citizens and heroes?  The coffee-houses were thrown into dire confusion, and literary societies were rent by fatal discord.  Even dinner-parties breathed only constraint and mistrust, and the intimacies of a lifetime came to cruel end. Rameau’s Nephew was composed in the midst of the first part of this long campaign of a quarter of a century, and its seems to have been revised by its author in the midst of the second great episode.  Diderot declares against the school of Rameau and Lulli.  That he should do so was a part of his general reaction in favour of what he called the natural, against the artifice and affectation.  Goethe has pointed out the inconsistency between Diderot’s sympathy for the less expressive kind of music, and his usual vehement passion for the expressive in art.  He truly observes that Diderot’s sympathy went in this way, because the novelty and agitation seemed likely to break up the old, stiff, and abhorred fashion, and to clear the ground afresh for other efforts.[299]

END OF VOL.  I.

Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh.  FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 1:  Oeuv., xviii. 505.]

[Footnote 2:  Oeuv., xviii. 364.]

[Footnote 3:  Ib. 379.]

[Footnote 4:  Oeuv., i. 30.]

[Footnote 5:  Wahlverwandschaften, pt. ii. ch. vii.  The reader will do well to consult the philosophical estimate of the function of the man of letters given by Comte, Philosophie Positive, v. 512, vi. 192, 287.  The best contemporary account of the principles and policy of the men of letters in the eighteenth century is to be found in Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un Tableau, etc., pp. 187-189 (ed. 1847).]