We need not wonder that for a while they paused helpless before the task of assimilating into an order all these rich materials that their humanism had evoked out of chaos. At first they were more discoverers than artists. But genuine progress, as we say, takes place only when a richer variety is stamped with a broader but still obvious unity. Art is not merely expression, of howsoever varied and penetrative a quality; it is congruous, harmonious expression, delighting us not only mediately by what it says, but immediately by what it is. In other words, it rises from the plane of interest to the plane of beauty, and becomes genuine art, only by the possession of that third or æsthetic value which depends on the ultimate unity of all the various factors of effect. This highest value music came, in the course of time, to possess; and the conquest of new forms, intrinsically beautiful, in which all the novel sensuous and expressive effects could be embodied, was of all the achievements of the seventeenth century the most important. It remains, therefore, to study, in another chapter, the means by which musicians learned, after long trial and patient experiment, to give shape and integral life to all this motley array of feelings and effects that they had summoned out of the depths of the human spirit. Their task, as may easily be believed, was an arduous one. We need not follow all the steps they took on that long road. It will suffice to examine some of the more important stages of their progress, to get before our minds the general artistic principles which underlay their practices, and to see what point they had reached by the time Haydn, the first great forerunner of Beethoven, came to take his share in their great enterprise. FOOTNOTES: [15] “Vice,” says Mr. George Bernard Shaw in his brilliant, paradoxical way, “is waste of life. Poverty, obedience, and celibacy are the canonical vices.” [16] “The Hermit of Carmel, and Other Poems,” by George Santayana, New York, 1901. [17] See the writings of Royce, Baldwin, and other writers on the social genesis of consciousness. [18] “The Renaissance in Italy.” [19] In the case of onomatopoetic words, of course, the general expression is added to the specific one--the word does sound like the thing. [20] “The Oxford History of Music,” vol. III, p. 45. [21] “Preparation”: see above, page 104. [22] See Chap. I, p. 9. [23] See Chap. II, p. 12. [24] See Chap. II, p. 26. CHAPTER IV THE PRINCIPLES OF PURE MUSIC CHAPTER IV THE PRINCIPLES OF PURE MUSIC