ESSAY THE FIRST. MUSIC, as an imitative art, ranks so much below Poetry and Painting, that, in my own opinion, which I have found confirmed by many late writers of the best judgment, it can hardly be so termed with propriety.* Notwithstanding this, it has certain qualities, so analogous to those which constitute Metre or Versification, such as Accent, Rhythm, Pause, and Cadence, that it thereby becomes, equally with Poetry, an object of criticism. It is, however, only within this century that, by our own writers, observations of a critical kind have been made upon it with any degree of philosophical precision.Thus when Mr. Addison made the Italian Opera, which was then lately introduced into England, the object of his elegant ridicule, he chose rather to dwell on certain absurdities in its stage representation and dramatic execution, than on the merit or demerit of the composer or performers. Hence a late musical historian † treated him with a flippancy that ill became him to express, had * See Harris's Three Treatises, Dr. Beattie on Poetry and Music, and particularly Mr. Twining's Second Dissertation prefixed to his Translation of Aristotle's Poetics. + Sir John Hawkins, in the Preface to his History of Music. there been a just cause for it; but this was not the case, for there is one of his Spectators, No. 29, on the subject of Recitative, which contains very just observations on that peculiar species of Music, which may be called declamatory. Observations, which, had they been duly attended to by our earlier English Composers, might have produced, what we shall now probably ever want, a true national recitative; for the present seems only that of the Italian Germanized by Handel. I mention this criticism of Mr. Addison merely as the first of the sort I allude to, that has come within the compass of my reading, written by an Englishman. Treatises on the art itself have been numerous. In these the masters of it have criticised their predecessors and contemporaries, but this only as grammarians have criticised grammarians; either for trespassing on the rules laid down by the old masters, for modulation and harmony; or for breaking, like Piscian's, Guido's head. But this, the reader sees, is widely different from the species of criticism I mean, and shall aim to pursue. Therefore, I think, I may safely affirm that the number of disquisitions, of this cast, on Music, has been much fewer than on Poetry, Painting, or any other of those operative modes of fancy and genius, who go under the hacknied titles of the fine and polite arts. The French, vain of their national Music, as of every thing else, I suspect were, till of late, as deficient in treatises on the art, as we who made no such boast. The indiscriminate praise, which they gave to Jean Baptiste Lully, we may justly suppose, was all that flowed from the pen of their writers, till the momentous critique of Jean Jaques Rousseau gave them to understand, that they had, in fact, no national Music at all. What this daring Swiss had the presumption to say, the Italian, the English, and every other European nation had long presumed to think. But it was reserved for his uncommon force of genius to put their general sentiments into the most eloquent and energetic language, and, after a literary conflict which nearly cost him his life, to gain a complete victory over the partizans of French Music; à victory so decisive, that the best judges in France itself, who had not before chosen to declare their sentiments, Messrs. D'Alembert, Diderot, and others, joined their critical forces with the Citizen of Geneva, and a musical revolution spread as speedily through the nation, as that political one, which, with sanguinary fury, is now hurrying to its crisis, while these sheets, written some years ago, are revising for the press. However eccentric this singular writer was, who effected the great change we have spoken of, when treating upon religious, moral, and political subjects, it is certain, that there is less of paradox in his disquisitions on this topic, than on any other. Music was in fact his profession; upon the art itself he had bestowed intense application. Endued by nature with a fine and discriU VOL. III. |