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76 National Music of the World.
due. And this did not take the form of patronage so much as of participation; so that music acquired there a life, an aspect, and a position somewhat different to those fought for or won by it during its childish years in other countries. Very limited, it may be suspected, was the amount of suggestion furnished by the untutored people of Italy to their churchmen and nobles. They, I repeat—as men in authority, of a genial and artistic temperament, which is for ever in search for culture and enrichment, should do—laid hold of the 'modes' of Greece, improved on the instruments of the East, and accepted aid from the Low Countries, and even, it has been said, from England, for the perfecting of counterpoint: just as they had laid hold of the marbles of Greece and appropriated its mythologies in Christianised forms.
Yet, with all this aid and protection, such music as Italy possessed, during a long series of years, may be asserted to have been as grim and ungracious to the ear, as are the pictures of Cimabue and Margharitone to the eye : valuable though both are to the archaeologist, drearily barbarous to such moderns as have not been trained into the habits of retrospective comparison belonging to antiquarian |
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