Its grammar was codified by Rameau early in the eighteenth century, and later theorists saw no reason to repudiate the main principles of Rameau’s doctrine. In the passionate stateliness of Rameau’s own music, in the gigantic dignity of Handel, in the genial _Gemütlichkeit_ of Bach, we see the same lucid and logical precision of language. It was only natural that eighteenth century criticism should regard the music of earlier centuries as crude and barbarous. The nineteenth century approached the older music with a more penetrating sense of scholarship, but could not help reading it in the same spirit. An age of antiquarian research inevitably tended to consider its discoveries as historical documents to be examined in the dry light of theory rather than as the expressions of intensely passionate humanity. The music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was interpreted according to the system of Rameau, for no other system could be conceived. If under these conditions it failed to make any emotional appeal, that did not matter: reverence for antiquity discouraged the unveiling of passion. III The development of all kinds of historical studies during the past half-century has caused a wide and by no means learned public to take a keen interest in the life of the past and in its artistic expression. We can no longer quietly accept the doctrine that music began with Bach, or even――as Victor Hugo suggested――with Palestrina. The architecture, sculpture and painting of the remote centuries, as well as their poetry, bring the ancient and mediaeval world vividly before our eyes and minds. We cannot help seeing that music must have been no less important in the lives of our ancestors than it is in our own; indeed, it often seems that in those far-away times the art of music exercised an even more cogent influence than it does now. How can it be, we ask, that people so strangely susceptible to the power of sound and at the same time so consummately accomplished in the other arts should have left behind them an art of music which we can only regard as crude and primitive?