for amusing, funny, or absurd. Our opinion finds confirmation in the pages of no less an authority than John Pickering, of Boston, who, in 1816, in his "Vocabulary and Phrases which Have Been Supposed to Be Peculiar to the United States of America," asserts that in his day, in New England, "musical" was used in the sense of "humorous. We venture to wonder whether this is the sense in which the word is intended to be understood when we see it in the well-known advertisement which constantly appears, or used to appear, in the columns of certain papers, enquiring for a lady one of whose requirements for a more or less desirable position is or was that she "must be musical." We hope our supposition is correct. For the sake of the lady, of course. And further, we are led to wonder again whether this interpretation of the word "musical," and the corresponding interpretation of the term "music," may not indicate their common origin from the word "amuse." Such is the opinion of the Century Dictionary. We hope, however, that this authority is not correct, as we have no liking or regard for what a groom (driving a squealing cat out of his stable) once described as "a(mews)ing mewsick.”

From the feline to the equine is not a far cry, so we next note that in the Cumberland fells of good old England a horse with defective breathing, technically known as a "roarer," is often termed "musical." "The weak point about that pony," said a friend to the writer on one occasion, "is that he is so musical."

An absolutely improper use of the word "musical," whether dignified or disgraced with a final "e" or otherwise, e.g., “musicale," is its application to a musical gathering or concert. This mongrel term, so regrettably popular in America, was cordially detested by the elder D'Israeli, who described the expression, in his Curiosities of Literature, as a cant term "still surviving amongst the confraternity of frivolity." Would that his pungent strictures could help us to get rid of this objectionable hybrid, which hangs like a veritable Old Man of the Sea around the necks of most American writers and conductors.

In conclusion we note one or two other obsolete expressions. The Editor of the New Music Review quotes Mortimer Collins, of 1873, as using the word "musicist." This, however, bad as it is, is not nearly so naughty as "pianoist,"—an expression we once heard from a College professor. We have already alluded to the use of the word "musitions" in the Elizabethan age. The House Accounts of Charles II, now, we believe, preserved in the State Paper Office, show that in the year 1663, "Captain" Cooke was paid £3 for the attendance at St. George's "feast," at Windsor,

"of Mr. Bates and Mr. Gregory, two other Music'ons there." More than two centuries and a half later, the celebrated amateur musician William Gardiner (1779-1853), the Leicester stocking manufacturer, the friend of Haydn and Beethoven, and the author of "The Music of Nature; an attempt to prove that what is passionate and pleasing in the art of singing, speaking, and performing upon musical instruments, is derived from the sounds of the animated world," quotes a letter received from a clerical friend, Dr. Parr, of Norwich, in which the latter says, "I have often joined in singing with minor canons and other musitianists at Norwich." Then Thomas Moore speaks of "musicianesses, which need not surprise those of us who are familiar with the dialects of the West of England. There a male performer is often termed a "musicer," a "musicianer," or even a "musican." According to the Standard Dictionary "musicianer" is still used in America as a disparaging term for a musician.

But the terms "musicry," meaning the art of music; "musicness, the quality of being musical; and "musicate," to set to music, are all practically dead and past revival, although the lastnamed expression has a Latin origin, musicatus, meaning “set to music." Fortunately for us the English language is sufficiently rich in musical expressions, or in terms wherewith to denote matters musical, that it is quite unnecessary for us to deplore the loss of these expressions or to desire their resuscitation. Nor need we vex our righteous souls as to whether music shall be spelled with or without a final "k," or even with a "z." All we need concern ourselves about is to see sharply to it that we have, as Shakespeare would express it, music in ourselves.

PURE MUSIC AND DRAMATIC MUSIC

I'

By PAUL BERTRAND1

T has long been a commonplace to affirm the supremacy of contemporary French music and to remind ourselves that no other school shows a like vitality or shines with such lustre. But though symphonic music in France has for the past half century continually increased in brilliance, the music of the theatre, subjected as it has been to opposing tendencies, has now reached a stage of uncertainty the cause of which it may be useful to investigate, if only to attempt a suggestion of its ultimate orientation.

It is universally recognised that music, preeminently the language of feeling, may be expressed in two very different ways that are essentially distinct.

Pure music aims above all else at the esthetic grouping of sounds; having no direct recourse to poetry it expresses feeling only in a way that is vague and general, undetermined by precision of language. Here music holds sovereign sway. Having to suffice unto itself, it is compelled to maintain, of itself alone, a balance of form calculated to satisfy the intellect at all times and consequently to sacrifice part of its intensity of expression.

Dramatic music, on the other hand, subordinates music to words, gestures, actions, largely absolving it of all concern as regards balance or form, seeing that poetry, the language of intellect, intervenes in direct fashion, and music simply strengthens it by contributing all the power of expression it can supply.

These two terms, therefore, pure music and dramatic music, do not represent an arbitrary classification of musical productions, but two different-and to some extent opposite conceptions of the rôle of music. The result has been that in every country in accordance with the particular tendencies of the race and in every school in accordance with the nature of each musician one of these two conceptions has always grown and developed at the expense of the other.

By courtesy of Le Ménestrel, where the article was originally published in June, 1921.

Now, the Latin genius, wholly objective and enamoured of clarity and preciseness, has always favoured the preponderance of dramatic music in Italy and France, whereas pure music has been more particularly adapted to Germany, whose art, being more interior and subjective, shows a certain tendency in the direction of the abstract.

In consequence, French music remained almost exclusively dramatic, right on to the latter half of the nineteenth century. Originating in the popular song, from the very first it endeavoured to attach itself to performances of various kinds (liturgical dramas, mysteries, profane gestures interspersed with dancing); from being monophonic it became polyphonic at the time of the Renaissance; then the taste for royal and princely fêtes and divertissements favoured the development of opera in its diverse forms to the almost absolute exclusion of pure music.

This latter did not really assert itself in French art until half a century ago, in the persons of Camille Saint-Saëns and César Franck. These two masters succeeded in a venture which a few French musicians, and more particularly Méhul, had already tentatively outlined at the end of the eighteenth century. It was not from them, however, that they obtained their inspiration, but rather from the glorious exponents of German art: Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn. It was from these that they borrowed the traditional schemes of the fugue, and especially of the sonata and the symphony, introducing more or less noteworthy modifications in the treatment. Thus did they open up a path for the so-called "symphonic" modern school, which, in imitation of the German classics, looks upon the symphony as the most complete and sublime form of pure music.

In France, Saint-Saëns and César Franck manifested a tendency to which the Latin genius had hitherto shown itself but moderately attracted. In pursuance of a stimulus corresponding to that followed by Brahms in Germany, they attempted to restore the sonata-symphony form, though this latter seemed to have accomplished everything of which it was capable in the music of Beethoven, who himself had finally perceived the necessity of abandoning it. The sonata-symphony betrays an irremediable decadence in those of his successors who have remained faithful to it. Both Saint-Saëns and Franck worked along parallel lines, each following his own temperament: the one profoundly French

in harmony of construction and the deductive logic of development, in distinctness of ideas and luminous clarity; the other more sensitive, less anxious about strict balance of structure and emphasis of ideas, creator of the so-called cyclic form realised by systematising the thematic affinities latent in Beethoven's final works.

Saint-Saëns's independent and individualistic mind prevented him from assuming the leadership of a school or exercising upon the musicians of his time more than the influence-though it was considerable resulting from the prestige of his work. César Franck, on the other hand, an artist with the soul of an apostle, gradually affirmed his personality in meditative effects which radiated on all sides and affected powerfully the minds of his many disciples. A sort of new tradition was thus created by him, even without his wish, owing to the mystic influence created by the value of his teaching and his great kindness of heart. He left behind a group formed almost exclusively of eager and cultured amateurs, inspired like himself with a somewhat supercilious respect for their art, disdainful of convention and facile success, and determined to carry out with all their might what they regarded as a sacred task: the renovation of French musical art.

The religious spirit-in the highest sense of the word—which animated César Franck continued to influence his pupils. In seeking, however, to become a principle of action, this spirit had to endeavour to acquire greater power and cohesion by retiring within itself; it thus culminated in the constitution of a sort of church, somewhat narrow though only the more active on that account, with its rigid dogmas, its chapel which dispensed teachings tinged with a strictly intellectual discipline, its high priest, the somewhat stern custodian of immutable Truth definitely stereotyped as a new gospel, and finally its inquisitors, ever ready to utter anathemas against all whose culpable eclecticism refused to bow to their orthodoxy. This church had its thurifers, giving free vent to a noisy and aggressive enthusiasm which one would gladly have liked to regard as always sincere. However, they largely helped it in exercising a certain influence, at first salutary enough, though destined finally to become disastrous, as invariably happens when any organism wilfully disregards the principle of evolution, which is the law of life itself.

The Franckist school endeavoured to advance pure music at the very time when theatrical music, then at the height of its popularity, seemed to have entered upon a path of the most pitifully decadent tendencies. Influenced by Auber, and more