Thus a new motive took complete possession of the art of music. By virtue of the new powers revealed to them, composers would now strive to enter all the secret precincts of the soul and give a voice to every emotion, simple or complex, called forth by solitary meditation or by situations of dramatic stress and conflict. Music, like painting and poetry, should now occupy the whole world of human experience. The stupendous achievements of the tonal art of the past two centuries are the outcome of this revolutionary impulse. But not at once could music administer the whole of her new possession. She must pass through a course of training in technic, to a certain extent as she had done in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but under far more favorable conditions and quite different circumstances. The shallowness of the greater part of the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is partly due to the difficulty that composers found in mastering the new forms. A facility in handling the material must be acquired before there could be any clear consciousness of the possibilities of expression which the new forms contained. The first problem in vocal music was the development of a method of technic; and musical taste, fascinated by the new sensation, ran into an extravagant worship of the human voice. There appeared in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the most brilliant group of singers, of both sexes, that the world has ever seen. The full extent of the morbid, we might almost say the insane, passion for sensuous, nerve-exciting tone is sufficiently indicated by the encouragement in theatre and church of those outrages upon nature, the male soprano and alto. A school of composers of brilliant melodic genius appeared in Italy, France, and Germany, who supplied these singers with showy and pathetic music precisely suited to their peculiar powers. Italian melody and Italian vocalism became the reigning sensation in European society, and the opera easily took the primacy among fashionable amusements. The Italian grand opera, with its solemn travesty of antique characters and scenes, its mock heroics, its stilted conventionalities, its dramatic feebleness and vocal glitter, was a lively reflection of the taste of this age of “gallant” poetry, rococo decoration, and social artificiality. The musical element consisted of a succession of arias and duets stitched together by a loose thread of _secco_ recitative. The costumes were those of contemporary fashion, although the characters were named after worthies of ancient Greece and Rome. The plots were in no sense historic, but consisted of love tales and conspiracies concocted by the playwright. Truth to human nature and to locality was left to the despised comic opera. Yet we must not suppose that the devotees of this music were conscious of its real superficiality. They adored it not wholly because it was sensational, but because they believed it true in expression; and indeed it was true to those light and transient sentiments which the voluptuaries of the theatre mistook for the throbs of nature. Tender and pathetic these airs often were, but it was the affected tenderness and pathos of fashionable eighteenth-century literature which they represented. To the profounder insight of the present they seem to express nothing deeper than the make-believe emotions of children at their play.