ial rapture, which, however innocently developed by him in the
sphere of music, was symptomatic of the most unhealthy tendencies of his
race and age. While singing these madrigals and these motetts the youth
of either sex were no longer reminded, it is true, of tavern ditties or
dance measures. But the emotions of luxurious delight or passionate
ecstasy deep in their own natures were drawn forth, and sanctified by
application to the language of effeminate devotion.

I have dwelt upon these two sets of compositions, rather than upon the
masses of strictly and severely ecclesiastical music which Palestrina
produced with inexhaustible industry, partly because they appear to have
been extraordinarily popular, and partly because they illustrate those
tendencies in art and manners which the sentimental school of Bolognese
painters attempted to embody. They belong to that religious sphere which
the Jesuit Order occupied, governed, and administered upon the lines of
their prescribed discipline. These considerations are not merely
irrelevant. The specific qualities of Italian music for the next two
centuries were undoubtedly determined by the atmosphere of sensuous
pietism in which it flourished, at the very time when German music was
striking far other roots in the Chorales of the Reformation epoch. What
Palestrina effected was to substitute in Church music the clear and
melodious manner of the secular madrigal for the heavy and scholastic
science of the Flemish school, and to produce masterpieces of religious
art in his motetts on the Canticles which confounded the lines of
demarcation between pious and profane expression. He taught music to
utter the emotions of the heart; but those emotions in his land and race
were already tending in religion toward the sentimental and voluptuous.

There is no doubt that the peril to which music was exposed at the time
of the Tridentine Council was a serious and real one. When we remember
how intimate was the connection between the higher kinds of music and
the ritual of the Church, this will be apparent. Nor is it too much to
affirm that the art at that crisis, but for the favor shown to it by
Pius IV. and for Palestrina's intervention, might have been well-nigh
extinguished in Italy. How fatal the results would then have been for
the development of modern music, can be estimated by considering the
decisive part played by the Italians in the formation of musical style
from the end of the s