The growth of such an art as this, without models, must necessarily be painfully slow. Many of the cloistered experimenters passed their lives in nursing an infant art without seeing enough progress to justify any very strong faith in the bantling’s future. Their floundering helplessness is often pathetic, but not enough so to overcome a smile at the futility of their devices. Practice and theory did not always work amiably together. In studying the chorus music of the Middle Age, we must observe that, as in the case of the liturgic chant, the singers did not deem it necessary to confine themselves to the notes actually written. In this formative period of which we are speaking it was the privilege of the singers to vary and decorate the written phrases according to their good pleasure. These adornments were sometimes carefully thought out, incorporated into the stated method of delivery, and handed down as traditions.[65] But it is evident that in the earlier days of counterpoint these variations were often extemporized on the spur of the moment. The result of this habit on the part of singers who were ignorant of the laws of musical consonance and proportion, and whose ears were as dull as their understandings, could easily be conceived even if we did not have before us the indignant testimony of many musicians and churchmen of the period. Jean Cotton, in the eleventh century, says that he could only compare the singers with drunken men, who indeed find their way home, but do not know how they get there. The learned theorist, Jean de Muris, of the fourteenth century, exclaims: “How can men have the face to sing discant who know nothing of the combination of sounds! Their voices roam around the _cantus firmus_ without regard to any rule; they throw their tones out by luck, just as an unskilful thrower hurls a stone, hitting the mark once in a hundred casts.” As he broods over the abuse his wrath increases. “O roughness, O bestiality! taking an ass for a man, a kid for a lion, a sheep for a fish. They cannot tell a consonance from a dissonance. They are like a blind man trying to strike a dog.” Another censor apostrophizes the singers thus: “Does such oxen bellowing belong in the Church? Is it believed that God can be graciously inclined by such an uproar?” Oelred, the Scottish abbot of Riverby in the twelfth century, rails at the singers for jumbling the tones together in every kind of distortion, for imitating the whinnying of horses, or (worst of all in his eyes) sharpening their voices like those of women. He tells how the singers bring in the aid of absurd gestures to enhance the effect of their preposterous strains, swaying their bodies, twisting their lips, rolling their eyes, and bending their fingers, with each note. A number of popes, notably John XXII., tried to suppress these offences, but the extemporized discant was too fascinating a plaything to be dropped, and ridicule and pontifical rebuke were alike powerless.