2

of an axe. Rousseau expected to be assassinated, and gravely assures us that there was a plot to that effect, as well as a design to put him in the Bastille. This we may fairly surmise to have been a fiction of his own imagination, and the only real punishment that overtook him was the loss of his right to free admission to the Opera. After what he had said of the intolerable horrors. of French music, the directors of the theatre can hardly be accused of vindictiveness in releasing him from them. Some twenty years after (1774), when Paris was torn assunder by the violence of the two great factions of the Gluckists and Piccinists, Rousseau retracted his opinion as to the impossibility of wedding melody to French words. He went as often as he could to hear the works both of Grétri and Gluck, and Orfeo delighted him, while the Fausse magie of the former moved him to say to the composer, "Your music stirs sweet sensations to which I thought my heart had long been closed." This being so, and life being as brief as art is long, we need not further examine the controversy. It may be worth adding that Rousseau wrote some of the articles on music for the Encyclopædia, and that in 1767 he published a not inconsiderable Musical Dictionary of his

own.

His scheme of a new musical notation and the principles on which he defended it are worth attention, because some of the ideas are now accepted as the base of a well-known and growing system of musical instruction. The aim of the scheme, let us say to begin with, was at once practical and popular; to reduce the

1 Corr. Lit., i. 92. His own piece was Le petit prophète de Bæhmischbroda, the style of which will be seen in a subsequent foot-note.

2 He was burnt in effigy by the musicians of the opera. Grimm, Corr. Lit., i. 113.

3 This is Turgot's opinion on the controversy (Letter to Caillard, Euv., ii. 827):-"Vous avez donc vu Jean-Jacques ; la musique est un excellent passe-port auprès de lui. Quant à l'impossibilité de faire de la musique française, je ne puis y croire, et votre raison ne me paraît pas bonne; car il n'est point vrai que l'essence de la langue française est d'être sans accent. Point de conversation animée sans beaucoup d'accent; mais l'accent est libre et déterminé seulement par l'affection de celui qui parle, sans être fixé par des conventions sur certaines syllabes, quoique nous ayons aussi dans plusieurs mots des syllabes dominantes qui seules peuvent être accentuées."

• Musset-Pathay, i. 289.

difficulty of learning music to the lowest possible point, and so to bring the most delightful of the arts within the reach of the largest possible number of people. Hence although he maintains the fitness of his scheme for instrumental as well as vocal performances, it is clearly the latter which he has most at heart, evidently for the reason that this is the kind of music most accessible to the thousands, and it was always the thousands of whom Rousseau thought. This is the true distinction of music, it is for the people; and the best musical notation is that which best enables persons to sing at sight. The difficulty of the old notation had come practically before him as a teacher. The quantity of details which the pupil was forced to commit to memory before being able to sing from the open book, struck him then as the chief obstacle to anything like facility in performance, and without some of this facility he rightly felt that music must remain a luxury for the few. So genuine was his interest in the matter, that he was not very careful to fight for the originality of his own scheme. Our present musical signs, he said, are so imperfect and so inconvenient that it is no wonder that several persons have tried to re-cast or amend them; nor is it any wonder that some of them should have hit upon the same device in selecting the signs most natural and proper, such as numerical figures. As much, however, depends on the way of dealing with these figures, as with their adoption, and here he submitted that his own plan was as novel as it was advantageous.' Thus we have to bear in mind that Rousseau's scheme was above all things a practical device, contrived for making the teaching and the learning of musical elements an easier process.

The chief element of the project consists in the substitution of a relative series of notes or symbols in place of an absolute series. In the common notation any given note, say the A of the treble clef, is uniformly represented by the same symbol, namely, the position of second space in the clef, whatever key it may belong Rousseau insisting on the varying quality impressed on any tone of a given pitch by the key-note of the scale to which it

to.

1 Preface to Dissertation sur la Musique Moderne, pp. 32, 33.

2 I am indebted to Mr. James Sully, M. A., for furnishing me with notes on a technical subject with which I have too little acquaintance.

belongs, protested against the same name being given to the tone, however the quality of it might vary. Thus Re or D, which is the second tone in the key of C, ought, according to him, to have a different name when found as the fifth in the key of G, and in every case the name should at once indicate the interval of a tone from its key-note. His mode of effecting this change is as follows. The names ut, re, and the rest, are kept for the fixed order of the tones, C, D, E, and the rest. The key of a piece is shown by prefixing one of these symbols, and this determines the absolute quality of the melody as to pitch. That settled, every tone is expressed by a number bearing a relation to the key-note. This tonic note is represented by one, the other six tones of the scale are expressed by the numbers from two to seven. In the popular Tonic Sol-Fa notation, which corresponds so closely to Rousseau's in principle, the key-note is always styled Do, and the other symbols, mi, la, and the rest, indicate at once the relative position of these tones in their particular key or scale. Here the old names were preserved as being easily sung; Rousseau selected numbers because he supposed that they best expressed the generation of the sounds.1

Rousseau attempted to find a theoretic base for this symbolic establishment of the relational quality of tones, and he dimly guessed that the order of the harmonics or upper tones of a given tonic would furnish a principle for forming the familiar major scale, but his knowledge of the order was faulty. He was perhaps groping after the idea by which Professor Helmholtz has accounted for the various mental effects of the several intervals in a key—namely, the degree of natural affinity, measured by means of the upper tones, existing between the given tone and its tonic. Apart from this, however, the practical value of his ideas in instruction in singing is clearly shown by the circumstance that at any given time many thousands of young children are now being taught to read melody in the Sol-Fa notation in a few weeks. This shows how right Rousseau was in continually declaring the ease of hitting a particular tone, when the relative position of the tone in respect to the key-note is clearly manifested. A singer in

trying to hit the tone is compelled to measure the interval between it and the preceding tone, and the simplest and easiest mode of doing this is to associate every tone with the tonics, thus constituting it a term of a relation with this fundamental tone.

Rousseau made a mistake, when he supposed that his ideas were just as applicable to instrumental as they were to vocal music. The requirements of the singer are not those of the player. To a performer on the piano, who has to light rapidly and simultaneously on a number of tones, or to a violinist who has to leap through several octaves with great rapidity, the most urgent need is that of a definite and fixed mark, by which the absolute pitch of each successive tone may be at once recognised. Neither of these has any time to think about the melodious relation of the tones; it is quite as much as they can do to find their place on the key-board or the string. Rousseau's scheme, or any similar one, fails to supply the clear and obvious index to pitch supplied by the old system. Old Rameau pointed this out to Rousseau when the scheme was laid before him, and Rousseau admitted that the objection was decisive,' though his admission was not practically deterrent.

His device for expressing change of octave by means of points, would render the rapid seizing of a particular tone by the performer still more difficult, and it is strange that he should have preferred this to the other plan suggested, of indicating height of octave by visible place above or below a horizontal line. Again, his attempt to simplify the many varieties of musical time by reducing them all to the two modes of double and triple time, though laudable enough, yet implies an imperfect recognition of the full meaning of time, by omitting all reference to the distribution of accent and to the average time value of the tones in a particular movement.

1 Conf., vii. 18, 19. Also Dissertation, pp. 74, 75

CHAPTER IX.

VOLTAIRE AND D'ALEMBERT.

EVERYBODY in the full tide of the eighteenth century had something to do with Voltaire, from serious personages like Frederick the Great and Turgot, down to the sorriest poetaster who sent his verses to be corrected or bepraised. Rousseau's debt to him in the days of his unformed youth we have already seen, as well as the courtesies with which they approached one another, when Richelieu employed the struggling musician to make some modifications in the great man's unconsidered court-piece. Neither of them then dreamed that their two names were destined to form the great literary antithesis of the century. In the ten years that elapsed between their first interchange of letters and their first fit of coldness, it must have been tolerably clear to either of them, if either of them gave thought to the matter, that their dissidence was increasing and likely to increase. Their methods were different, their training different, their points of view different, and above all these things, their temperaments were different by a whole heaven's breadth.

A great number of excellent and pointed half-truths have been uttered by various persons in illustration of all these contrasts. The philosophy of Voltaire, for instance, is declared to be that of the happy, while Rousseau is the philosopher of the unhappy. Voltaire steals away their faith from those who doubt, while Rousseau strikes doubt into the mind of the unbeliever. The gaiety of the one saddens, while the sadness of the other consoles. If we pass from the marked divergence in tendencies, which is