Several features of this marvellous style were destined to disappear simply with the natural growth of music. In the first place the polyphonic ideal, in its highest, strictest sense--the submersion of many melodies in a river of sound in which no melody is evident, the complete suppression of individual personal utterance--was a mediæval and essentially intellectual ideal. It could not long maintain its hold against the inborn natural desire of the individual to sing out his own personal feelings. For it meant the suppression of melody, an unnatural restraint. In the second place, from the time when two melodies were first joined the knowledge and appreciation of harmony were bound to grow--that is, the knowledge of the effect of dissonances and consonances following each other, and it needed but a matter of time for men to come to plan music with the end of producing such effects in a definite sequence. Now in polyphony the consideration of the progression of chords was entirely secondary to the ideal of writing several independent voice parts. Of course the influence of the church modes was strong in delaying the development of the harmonic bases of music, they were iron bands about harmony and they quite fettered modulation, for it was forbidden to pass in the course of a piece from one mode to another. But here again the Palestrina style is related to the scholasticism of the Middle Ages. The ecclesiastical modes were in general closely connected with the philosophy of æsthetics, on the one hand, and with mathematics, on the other; and all the popular music which has been preserved from the Middle Ages shows an unmistakable and deeply significant choice of those modes only which resemble our own major and minor. In the suppression of individual emotion, in the banishment of rhythm and other active startling elements of music in order to produce the effect of vagueness and mystery, in the limitation of music to ecclesiastical modes, the Palestrina style is the flower of the spirit of the Middle Ages, of a spirit that in the lifetime of Palestrina himself was already dissipating in thin air. He stands looking backward upon the centuries which had given him birth, while on every hand the activities of man were urging impetuously forward. To the new aims, therefore, we must now turn our attention. F. B. FOOTNOTES: [114] _Luther als Vater des evangelischen Kirchenliedes._