Thus in all ways the tendency of music in the seventeenth century was toward a fuller, more varied, and more poignant emotional expressiveness. Men were willing to forego without a murmur all the advantages of the perfected technique of the earlier choral age, and to trust themselves on the pathless sea of the New Music, because, like the pilgrims who in the same century left European civilization behind them to seek a larger if more difficult life in an uncharted country, they were inspired by a love of the human spirit in its fullness and freedom. All arbitrary limitations and denials of it, no matter how hallowed by long usage, were to them not religious, but sacrilegious. To them, as to Terence, “nothing human was alien”; and they might have cried, with Whitman, to every human trait, however trivial, ignoble, or commonplace, “Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you.”
We need not wonder that for a while they paused helpless before the task of assimilating into an order all these rich materials that their humanism had evoked out of chaos. At first they were more discoverers than artists. But genuine progress, as we say, takes place only when a richer variety is stamped with a broader but still obvious unity. Art is not merely expression, of howsoever varied and penetrative a quality; it is congruous, harmonious expression, delighting us not only mediately by what it says, but immediately by what it is. In other words, it rises from the plane of interest to the plane of beauty, and becomes genuine art, only by the possession of that third or æsthetic value which depends on the ultimate unity of all the various factors of effect. This highest value music came, in the course of time, to possess; and the conquest of new forms, intrinsically beautiful, in which all the novel sensuous and expressive effects could be embodied, was of all the achievements of the seventeenth century the most important.
It remains, therefore, to study, in another chapter, the means by which musicians learned, after long trial and patient experiment, to give shape and integral life to all this motley array of feelings and effects that they had summoned out of the depths of the human spirit. Their task, as may easily be believed, was an arduous one. We need not follow all the steps they took on that long road. It will suffice to examine some of the more important stages of their progress, to get before our minds the general artistic principles which underlay their practices, and to see what point they had reached by the time Haydn, the first great forerunner of Beethoven, came to take his share in their great enterprise.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] “Vice,” says Mr. George Bernard Shaw in his brilliant, paradoxical way, “is waste of life. Poverty, obedience, and celibacy are the canonical vices.”
[16] “The Hermit of Carmel, and Other Poems,” by George Santayana, New York, 1901.
[17] See the writings of Royce, Baldwin, and other writers on the social genesis of consciousness.
[18] “The Renaissance in Italy.”