It will be necessary, however, to linger still a little longer on the threshold, in order to examine in more detail yet the two scarcely less interesting periods which preceded it,--the periods of Palestrina and Bach,--and to define yet more precisely those fundamental principles of pure music on the efficacy of which its glory depended. FOOTNOTES: [1] See the author’s “From Grieg to Brahms,” pp. 219-223. [2] “First Principles,” American edition, p. 358. [3] Op. cit., p. 326. [4] For a fuller statement of this theory of musical expression, see “From Grieg to Brahms,” pp. 6-11. [5] These principles will be studied more in detail in the chapter on The Principles of Pure Music. [6] For a technical explanation of equal temperament, see Dr. Parry’s “Evolution of the Art of Music,” pp. 187-188. CHAPTER II PALESTRINA AND THE MUSIC OF MYSTICISM CHAPTER II PALESTRINA AND THE MUSIC OF MYSTICISM It has been often pointed out by historians and critics that in their early stages the arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting were the servants of religion. Nursed through their infancy by the cherishing hand of the church, they emerged into the secular world only with their comparative maturity. Architecture, which in our day and country embodies itself chiefly in great civic and mercantile buildings, began with the temples of the pagan Greeks and the cathedrals of the mediæval Christians. Sculpture for the most part delineated, in antiquity, Egyptian or Greek gods and goddesses; and in the middle ages, Christian saints. Even painting, which at the Renaissance became for all time a secular art, inspired by its own ideals and controlled only by intrinsic conditions, commenced by picturing on mediæval altar-pieces and frescoes the heroes of sacred story, with their upturned eyes and their clasped hands, and by symbolizing the dogmas or illustrating the narratives of its task-master, religion. J. A. Symonds, in the third part of his “Renaissance in Italy,” in which he describes at length this universal dependence of art, in its early stages, on the church, offers the following plausible explanation of it: “Art aims at expressing an ideal; and this ideal is the transfiguration of human elements into something nobler, felt and apprehended by the imagination. Such an ideal, such an all-embracing glorification of humanity, exists for simple and unsophisticated societies only in the forms of religion.”[7] It is not, indeed, until art, nurtured in cloisters, acquires definite aims, technical methods, and self-confidence, that it can put off its dependence on ecclesiastical aid, at first favorable but eventually restrictive, and essay a free life.