ench music with great sounding strokes
as of an axe.[322] Rousseau expected to be assassinated, and gravely
assures us that there was a plot to that effect, as well as a design to
put him in the Bastille. This we may fairly surmise to have been a
fiction of his own imagination, and the only real punishment that
overtook him was the loss of his right to free admission to the Opera.
After what he had said of the intolerable horrors of French music, the
directors of the theatre can hardly be accused of vindictiveness in
releasing him from them.[323] Some twenty years after (1774), when Paris
was torn asunder by the violence of the two great factions of the
Gluckists and Piccinists, Rousseau retracted his opinion as to the
impossibility of wedding melody to French words.[324] He went as often
as he could to hear the works both of Gretri and Gluck, and _Orfeo_
delighted him, while the _Fausse magie_ of the former moved him to say
to the composer, "Your music stirs sweet sensations to which I thought
my heart had long been closed."[325] This being so, and life being as
brief as art is long, we need not further examine the controversy. It
may be worth adding that Rousseau wrote some of the articles on music
for the Encyclopaedia, and that in 1767 he published a not inconsiderable
Musical Dictionary of his own.

His scheme of a new musical notation and the principles on which he
defended it are worth attention, because some of the ideas are now
accepted as the base of a well-known and growing system of musical
instruction. The aim of the scheme, let us say to begin with, was at
once practical and popular; to reduce the difficulty of learning music
to the lowest possible point, and so to bring the most delightful of the
arts within the reach of the largest possible number of people. Hence,
although he maintains the fitness of his scheme for instrumental as well
as vocal performances, it is clearly the latter which he has most at
heart, evidently for the reason that this is the kind of music most
accessible to the thousands, and it was always the thousands of whom
Rousseau thought. This is the true distinction of music, it is for the
people; and the best musical notation is that which best enables persons
to sing at sight. The difficulty of the old notation had come
practically before him as a teacher. The quantity of details which the
pupil was forced to commit to memory before being able to sing from the
open book, struck him t