We can trace the psychology of this programme-music with great ease in the French instrumental art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the first definite orchestral programme-piece--the storm in Marais’ opera Alcyone--to the volume of François Dandrieu, “contenant plusieurs Divertissements dont les principaux sont les caractères de la guerre, ceux de la chasse, et la fête de Village”; from the lute-dances of Gaultier to the clavier-pieces of Rameau, we see nothing but an endeavour of the developed dance-form to enter into relations with actual life--an endeavour which leads to the manifold names of the pieces. Formerly the dances had taken their names from the songs. Now, as definite pieces, they are so full of special significance, so rich in all kinds of characteristic figures and harmonies, that the composer feels his mind insensibly drawn to incidents of life, of persons, of characters, humours, landscapes, and calls upon all his fertility in association to fashion decorative titles out of them. Music, which has arrived at the limits of the traditional dance-forms, passes over from the formal to the characteristic. As Berlioz’ Queen Mab is nothing but a further development of Beethoven’s Scherzos, and not a heaven-descended music, discovered in Shakespeare, so the pieces of the great clavierist Couperin, whether they have descriptions of humours or personal names for titles, are merely the developments of dances, which, so fertile were they, reminded the composer of life itself. Couperin himself declares that he gives in his pieces portraits, which appear to give to others also, before whom they are performed, the actual features of the models. But it is obvious that he could hold himself as a portrait-painter, only so far as his music was rich enough, by its definite relations to actual life, to give clearer definition and a distinct picture to its stream as it flowed in a thousand forms. Like all programme-musicians, he is such, not from poverty in musical invention, but from wealth. The French are a people that revel in the fulness of forms, and find their very life in the special magic of the formal presentation of all things, whether social or artistic. Thus in their hands all musical forms, melodious, harmonic, rhythmic, grew so luxuriantly, that at all times, from Jannequin to St Saens, in order to live they have necessarily turned to programme-music.