398 The Evolution of Music. 



Beethoven closed the direct line of evolution of the new 

 school in other words, we can clearly trace the rise of this 

 school in Bach and Handel, and its growth up to the Beet- 

 hoven period, through well-marked phases. Since Beet- 

 hoven's time music has become, as we might say, diffracted, 

 and specialized into conflicting theories and modes. 



Mendelssohn and Schumann were contemporary but 

 Mendelssohn, with his adherence to correctness in form and 

 harmonic rules, is not for a moment to be placed in the 

 same school of composers who follow Schumann's subjective 

 romantic style. Later compositions show, with a few notable 

 exceptions such as those of Chopin, Rubinstein, and Brahms 

 a tendency to break loose from all authority of form and 

 indulge in a vague idealism which bears no good promise 

 for a revival of sustained melodic-harmonic compositions, to 

 which music must, however, return if it is to accomplish 

 any definite progress. As there has arisen in these later 

 days, in the art of painting, the school of " impressionists " 

 who would accomplish their effects by contrasts of strong 

 combinations in color, regardless, to a great extent, of correct 

 drawing, so many later composers seek to produce unity of 

 effect by strongly contrasted masses of tone with slight re- 

 gard for the necessity of grouping these around some central 

 and worthy musical thought. As Prof. Macfarren has just- 

 ly said, " The development of plan or design in musical 

 composition has been the fruition of the last two centu- 

 ries, and, in spite of all dispute as to its paramount necessity, 

 hope points to it as the everlasting standard of genuineness 

 in art." 



One reason for the divergence of schools of music since 

 the Beethoven period may be found in the fact of the in- 

 fluence of his wonderful personality, working just at the 

 time when there was a universal ferment in literature and 

 art, led by Goethe and Schiller in Germany, and by the 

 Romanticists, typified by Hugo and Gautier, in France. 

 Beethoven's great art-forms thrown into the midst of this 

 new enthusiasm were prolific in diversity, and the last and 

 greatest result of this movement was Richard "Wagner, who 

 is a direct consequence of the working of the musical spirit 

 of the age. 



The history of the invention of musical notation, which 

 is the sign-language of music, clearly demonstrates the 

 operation of the evolutionary law of differentiation. It 



