I shall add no more to what I have here offer’d,
than that Musick, Architecture, and Painting, as well
as Poetry, and Oratory, are to deduce their Laws and
Rules from the general Sense and Taste of Mankind,
and not from the Principles of those Arts themselves;
or, in other Words, the Taste is not to conform to
the Art, but the Art to the Taste. Music is not
design’d to please only Chromatick Ears, but
all that are capable ef distinguishing harsh from
disagreeable Notes. A Man of an ordinary Ear
is a Judge whether a Passion is express’d in
proper Sounds, and whether the Melody of those Sounds
be more or less pleasing. [7]
[Footnote 1: that]
[Footnote 2: only asking]
[Footnote 3: Henry Purcell died of consumption
in 1695, aged 37.
‘He was,’ says Mr. Hullah,
in his Lectures on the History of Modern Music,
’the first Englishman to demonstrate the possibility
of a national opera. No Englishman of the last
century succeeded in following Purcell’s lead
into this domain of art; none, indeed, would seem
to have understood in what his excellence consisted,
or how his success was attained. His dramatic
music exhibits the same qualities which had already
made the success of Lulli. ... For some years
after Purcell’s death his compositions, of
whatever kind, were the chief, if not the only,
music heard in England. His reign might have lasted
longer, but for the advent of a musician who, though
not perhaps more highly gifted, had enjoyed immeasurably
greater opportunities of cultivating his gifts,’
Handel, who had also the advantage of being born thirty
years later.]
[Footnote 4: John Baptist Lulli, a Florentine,
died in 1687, aged 53. In his youth he was an
under-scullion in the kitchen of Madame de Montpensier,
niece to Louis XIV. The discovery of his musical
genius led to his becoming the King’s Superintendent
of Music, and one of the most influential composers
that has ever lived. He composed the occasional
music for Moliere’s comedies, besides about twenty
lyric tragedies; which succeeded beyond all others
in France, not only because of his dramatic genius,
which enabled him to give to the persons of these
operas a musical language fitted to their characters
and expressive of the situations in which they were
placed; but also, says Mr. Hullah, because
’Lulli being the first modern composer
who caught the French ear, was
the means, to a great extent, of forming
the modern French taste.’
His operas kept the stage for more than a century.]
[Footnote 5: that he]
[Footnote 6: not]
* * * *
*
No. 30. [1] Wednesday, April 4, 1711.
Steele.
’Si, Mimnermus
uti censet, sine amore Focisque
Nil est Jucundum;
vivas in amore Jocisque.’
Hor.
