centuries have no power over the Palestrina style," says its
historian; "it can neither fade nor die." Truly does Wagner say we
shall never believe the vocal school which followed it to have been
the legitimate daughter of that wondrous mother.

The predominant feature of this music is harmony, brought forth by the
union, not of sounds, but of melodies--different and contrasting
melodies united in harmony, that is the characteristic of the
polyphonic school, and the rhythm is marked, not by accents, but by
changes of the chords. It is a rhythm of quantity alone, not of accent
and quantity combined, as in the song and the dance and in modern
music. Thus, although dancing was by no means excluded from the church
in early times--its trace still remains in the name choir [Greek:
choros] for that part of the church where the dancing was
performed[19]--its most characteristic element, accent, came to be
banished from the music of the church as something foreign to the
character of religious worship. But the loss was amply repaid by the
wealth and richness which the harmonic structure was able to acquire,
and which was rendered intelligible by that fine and expressive method
of handling the separate voices which we know as counterpoint. This is
not without some interest for us, because, widely as Wagner's
harmonies differ from those of Palestrina, we shall find that they too
can often only be understood through the progression of the voices.
The same is true of Bach's harmonies. Harmony was generated by
polyphony, and not _vice versa_; that is, men first tried fitting
melodies together, not chords, and when they had learned to do this
skilfully, so that they sounded well together, harmony came into
being. It does not follow that the music was unrhythmic because it was
unaccented, and because in writing it was not divided into bars. No
music can be intelligible without rhythm. The rhythmic pulsations are