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I INTRODUCTION: THE APPRECIATION OF MUSIC 1

II EDVARD GRIEG 47

V C?SAR FRANCK 121

VI PETER ILYITCH TSCHA?KOWSKY 149

FACING PAGE

BRAHMS AT THE PIANO Title From a charcoal drawing by W. von Beckerath

GRIEG 49

DVO??K 73

SAINT-SA?NS 99

FRANCK 123

TSCHA?KOWSKY 151

BRAHMS 175

I INTRODUCTION THE APPRECIATION OF MUSIC

However interesting may be the study of an art through the personalities of the artists who have produced it, and such study, since art is a mode of human expression, is indeed essential, it must be supplemented by at least some general knowledge of the long continuous evolution in which the work of the most brilliant individual is but a moment, a phase. The quality of a man's work in art, and especially, as will be seen in a moment, in music, depends not alone on the depth of his character and the force of his talent, but also largely on the technical resources he owes to others, on the means for expressing himself that he finds ready to his hand. Whatever his personal powers or limitations, the value of his work will be determined not more by these than by the helps and hindrances of his artistic inheritance.

The great edifice of art, in fact, is like those Gothic cathedrals on which generations of men successively labored; thousands of common workmen hewed their foundation stones; finer minds, architects, smiths, brass founders, glass makers and sculptors, wrought and decorated the superstructures; and the work of each, whatever his personal skill and devotion, was valuable only because it built upon and added to that of all the rest. The soaring spires are firmly based on blocks of stone ploddingly adjusted; the windows, often of such a perfect beauty that they seem created rather than constructed, had nevertheless to be built up bit by bit; and all the marvelous organism of pillars, arches and buttresses is so delicately solid, so precariously stable, that had one stress been miscalculated, one joint inaccurately made, the whole would collapse. So it is with the edifice of art, and particularly with that of music, which depends for its very material on the labors of musicians. Pigments, clay, marble, the materials of the plastic arts, exist already in the world; but the whole ladder of fixed tones on which music is built is the product of man's aesthetic sense, and had to be created slowly and laboriously by many generations of men. The successions of chords which every banjo player strums in his accompaniments were the subject of long trial by the mediaeval composers. The hymn tune that any boy can write is modeled on a symmetrical scheme of phrases developed by countless experimenters. It took men centuries to select and arrange the eight tones of the ordinary scale, and centuries more to learn how to combine them in chords. And the most eloquent modern works depend on this long evolution of resources just as inevitably as the Gothic spire rests on the hewn stones so carefully laid. In the art, as in the cathedral, the seen rests upon the unseen, the beautiful upon the solid, the complex upon the simple, the new upon the old. The product of a thousand artists, music is as dependent on each as the coral reef on the tiny indispensable body of each insect; and on the other hand the individual musician, whatever his ability, is great only as he uses the equipment his fellows have prepared--<>

If, then, we would justly value the half dozen composers who have done most for music in our day, we must add to our understanding of them as persons a knowledge of the general development in which they play a part; we must gain some sense of that great process of musical growth from which they inherit their resources, to which they make their various contributions, and in relation to which alone they can be fairly compared and appreciated. After examining the general course of musical history, ascertaining some fundamental principles, and applying these principles to our special judgments, we shall be able to perceive the greatest musicians of our day in their relations, and to get a perspective view of modern music in which they shall take their proper places.

If we wish to get an idea of primeval music, to see from what impulses it took rise, we have only to study the musical activities of children and savages, in whom we have primeval man made contemporary, the remote past brought conveniently into the present to be observed. When we make such a study we find that both children and savages express their feelings by gestures and cries, that under the sway of emotion they either dance or sing. To them quiet, silent feeling is impossible. Are they joyful, they leap and laugh; are they angry, they strike and shout; are they sad, they rock and moan. Moreover, we can discriminate the kinds of feeling that are expressed by these cries and gestures. Roughly speaking, bodily movement is the natural outlet of active vitality, of the joy of life and the lust of living, while it is the more contemplative emotions--love, grief, reverie, devotion--that find vocal utterance. The war-dances and revels of savages, accompanied by drum and tomtom, are gesticulatory; their love-songs and ululations over the dead are vocal. In the same way children in their moments of enthusiasm are wont to march about shouting and stamping in time, all their limbs galvanized with nervous force; and it is when the wave of energy has passed and they sit on the floor engrossed in blocks or dolls that they sing to themselves their curious undulating chants. Even in ourselves we can observe the same tendencies, checked though they be by counter-impulses in our more complex temperaments: when we are gay we walk briskly, clicking our heels in time and perhaps whistling a catch; in our dreamier hours we are quiet, or merely hum a tune under our breath. Thus through all human nature runs the tendency to vent feeling, active and contemplative, in those bodily movements and vocal utterances which underlie the two great generators of music, dance and song.

Such activities, however, are by no means as yet dance and song. At first they are no more than mere reflex actions, as spontaneous and unthinking as the <> of the man who stubs his toe. The emotion is felt, and out comes the gesture or cry; that is all. It is the organism's way of letting off steam. It is not expression, not being prompted by a desire to communicate the feeling, but merely by the impulse to be unburdened of it. Before there can be true expression or communication, there must be two more links added to the chain of which these automatic activities are only the first. The second link is imitation. According to a theory widely exploited in recent years, we tend to imitate whatever we see another do. With children the tendency is so strong that a large part of their time and energy is devoted to elaborate impersonation and make-believe, and the entire basis of their education is acquired through this directly assimilative faculty. In adults it is less active, but every sensitive person knows how difficult it is not to imitate foreign accents, stammering, and other petty mannerisms, and few are so callous that they can withstand the infection of strong stimuli like the gestures and cries of emotion. The wailing baby in the street car, who moves all the other babies within hearing to wail also ; the dog baying the moon until all within earshot join in the serenade; the negro at the camp-meeting clapping his hands until the whole company is in a rhythmic ecstasy--these are examples of the contagion of cries and gestures. Bearing them in mind, it is easy to see that the vocal or bodily acts which in the first place are mere reflexes of feeling, performed with no thought of expression, but only for personal easement, will generally, nevertheless, prompt similar acts in others. The performances of the individual will not end with himself; thanks to the instinct of imitation, they will be very widely copied.

But now--and this is the third link of the chain--bodily acts set up mental states, and a man cannot gesticulate or vocalize without feeling the emotions of which his actions are, as we say, expressive. <> writes Professor William James in his brilliant, paradoxical way, <> and whether or not we agree with his extreme view that the mental state is entirely a reverberation of bodily disturbances, we cannot but realize that in all these cases executing the expression tends to give us the feeling. He who persistently smiles will end by being cheerful, and a moderate amount of sighing or groaning will make any one melancholy. Above all, the imitation of vocal movements, such as we all go through at least incipiently when we hear melody, and the <> that strong dance-music so irresistibly prompts--these actions very noticeably set up in us their appropriate states of feeling. We not only imitate the lip motions and throat contractions of a persuasive speaker or singer, but doing so fills us with the emotion that prompts his utterance. Tired soldiers not only step out to a potently rhythmical tune--that is, they not only imitate the beat--but they actually feel less weary, more energetic, so long as the stimulus lasts. Once a bodily activity is set up, no matter how, it arouses the mental state proper to it; in a word, expression generates emotion.

Obviously, then, if in the first place the natural outlets of emotional excitement are bodily motions and vocal sounds, if in the second place the observation of such motions and sounds arouses the impulse to imitate them, and if finally this imitation produces again in the imitator the states of mind which first set the whole process going, then these motions and sounds, these inchoate germs of dance and song, possess an enormous latent power of expression, and need only to be systematized to become a wonderfully eloquent language. Such a language, in fact, is music.

At this point, however, it is important not to go too fast. These crude gestures and cries by which primeval man expressed his feelings, though they were the germs out of which music grew, were as yet no more music, which is not only expressive sound, but formed, articulate sound, than an infant's cooings are speech. So far they were mere ebullitions, purposeless and formless; before they could become communicative they must become definite, they must take on some organic structure. Now gestures, bodily movements, are very easily grouped together by means of accent. Every walker knows that it is difficult not to emphasize alternate steps, grouping the unaccented with the accented into a cluster of two. Every waltzer makes a similar grouping of three steps, one accented, the other two subordinate. Some such system of grouping is instinctively adopted whenever we have a series of impressions regularly recurring in time. Let the reader, listening to the ticking of a watch, note how impossible it is to attend to each tick by itself. He will inevitably group them in twos; the accent may come on the first or on the last of the group, but he cannot hear them as exactly equal, any more than in walking he can put exactly equal stress on each step. It was this tendency of the mind to group its impressions on a basis of equal time measurements and unequal accents that led at the dawn of musical history to meter or rhythm, which is as persistent in music as it is in poetry. Metrical form was the natural means of giving definition to bodily movements, and as soon as it was developed enough to produce regular, easily imitated steps out of the chaotic gestures of na?ve feeling, Dance was born.

At first, of course, metrical form was stumbled upon blindly. Having two arms and two legs, men naturally moved with a symmetry that gradually impressed their minds; obliged by the facts of anatomy to group their motions in twos, they soon took the hint, and beat their drums or struck their cymbals accordingly. The primeval dance was doubtless the march. But soon they began to carry out the principle they had thus chanced upon, and despite anatomy devised the group of three. The existence of triple meter is all the proof needed that metrical form is essentially a process of intelligence, not a physical fatality; men grouped their steps or leaps or drum-taps in twos or in threes because such groups were easy to make, to imitate, and to remember. And once perceived, no matter how, such groupings tended to cling, to perpetuate themselves. For they were definite, memorable forms, and they survived all haphazard gestures and vague motions by virtue of the law that what is adapted to its environment will live longer than what is not. In this case the environment was the human mind; and the definite organisms, the metrical forms, survived and developed because the mind could remember them, while all the vague gestures out of which they grew shared the fate of what is indefinite, accidental, inorganic. Thus Dance, which was gesticulation systematized by metrical form, emerged and grew in the human mind, like an animal in a congenial habitat.

For a long while the metrical forms that men could perceive and remember were most rudimentary. Probably it took them centuries to grasp the simple group of three, the basis of such accent-schemes as the waltz and the mazurka. Even to-day, psychologists agree, we are unable to grasp a group of seven, and we perceive larger groups than three only as compounded of the elementary twos and threes. But gradually men learned to recombine their groups in still larger forms, of which the first groups constituted the elements. Just as in chemistry the basic elements like oxygen and hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon, can combine only in a few simple ways, but the compound molecules thus produced can recombine into the myriad substances of organic chemistry, the sugars and starches and all the rest, so the simple dual and triple measures of music can be built into an infinite variety of figures and phrases. In early dance and folk-song a more and more complex metrical plan thus slowly developed. Two or more of the simple groups of beats, called measures, were combined into a larger group, a recognizable figure or motif; then again motifs were combined into still larger phrases; and finally, as the musical medium became more definite, plastic and various, phrases were combined in many different types of design, into complete <> In all these regroupings, the wonderful variety of which is one of the most precious resources of modern music, the fundamental procedure was the same--elements alike in duration, but different in accent or significance, were made to cohere in a group or form. Just as in verse the feet, or elementary metrical forms whose elements are single syllables of equal duration but unequal stress, are combined into lines, and later these lines into stanzas, so in music measures are combined in figures, and figures built up into phrases, and phrases into tunes. And as the diversity of the possible forms becomes greater and greater as we advance from foot to stanza, there being few forms of feet but many of stanza, so metrical form in music becomes more and more complex as it evolves, and though all music must be built out of dual or triple measures, it may be built into tunes of an infinite variety of pattern. Each new complexity, however, must be intelligible; it cannot be introduced until men have mastered the simpler groups out of which it is compounded. Beethoven's wondrously intricate texture, Brahms's soaring phrases, would be meaningless to us had we not inherited from thousands of ancestors a sense of the system of regular accents and duration on which their complexities are superposed. From the days, ages ago, when savages first beat a drum in simple march rhythm, up to to-day, when Brahms builds up his extraordinarily intricate fabrics, with their elaborate prosody, their <> and <> and <> the evolution of metrical form has been single and continuous; each advance has been built on previous achievements. There are no dropped stitches in this kind of knitting.

Metrical form, however, is not the only sort of form by which sounds can be combined. It is the natural organizing agent of Dance, which, as we have seen, develops out of the movements expressive of men's active impulses; but human nature has also its contemplative side, and this, expressing itself in vocal utterance, undergoes another sort of development and results in Song. What, then, are the means by which Song is defined, by which vocal sounds are organized into intelligible and memorable forms? Before we answer this question it will be well to consider for a moment a more general one. What, in general, is a form?

We shall be helped to define a form in general by looking back to the metrical forms we have just been studying. These, we have seen, are groups or clusters of impressions, held together by some similarity, yet also differentiated by some contrast. The two or three beats of the measure-group are similar in duration, yet different in accent. And without both the similarity and the difference, the unity and the variety, they would not be a group. Without similarity they would be a haphazard collection, a chaos; without difference they would all fuse together in one indistinguishable mass. In other words, they exemplify a general fact about forms--namely, that the elements must be alike enough to be associated, and yet different enough to be discriminated. If we cannot associate them we cannot feel them as a group; they will not cohere. If, on the other hand, we cannot discriminate them, then do they equally fail to make up a form; they simply mingle together into a homogeneous lump. The organs of an organism must be, then, related, yet different; the elements of a form must be both similar and dissimilar. Unless they are both we cannot perceive them as linked, yet distinct. Bearing this general fact about forms in mind, we may investigate the kinds of form that underlie Song.

Probably every one who has listened to the whistling of factories in a large city at noon has had the curious experience of suddenly hearing amid the meaningless din a pair of tones that mysteriously mate and merge. The other tones seem entirely accidental; they have no relation to each other, and give one merely a sense of vague annoyance. But these two form an intelligible group; we are able to grasp them together, and we take an indescribable pleasure in thus feeling them as parts of one whole. Here is an instance of another sort of musical form than the metrical, a sort that we may call harmonic. Here the grouping takes place on a platform not of time, but of pitch; the two elements of the group have no metrical relations, but in pitch they are somehow related. Now this sort of pitch relationship has played a vital part in music, a part hardly secondary to that of time relationship; so that an understanding of it is important enough to delay us here a moment with some rather dry technical facts on which it depends.

Ordinary musical tones, the notes of the voice, the violin, and the piano, for example, simple as they sound, are, like ordinary white light, rather complex compounds of many simple elements. There are in them seven or eight constituent or <> tones, quite distinctly audible to the trained ear or to the untrained ear armed with suitable instruments; and these partial tones, produced by vibrations in the sound-emitting body whose rates are regularly related, bear a certain fixed relation to each other, like the spectrum-colors that compose white light. Not only this, but each partial tone arouses its own proper sensation in the ear by stimulating there one of the minute filaments called the cords of Corti, each of which vibrates sympathetically to a tone of given pitch and to no other. Now we are to imagine that when an ordinary musical tone is sounded, seven or eight of these little cords immediately start a-tremble, and send to the brain their messages, which combine there into the composite impression we name <> If now another tone is sounded, one which starts into motion another set of filaments, and if furthermore there is one filament now set in motion that was also excited by the first compound tone--if, in other words, the two tones happen to have a partial tone in common, which in both instances excites the same filament in the ear, then we shall have a sense of close relationship between them; they will make together a harmonic group or form. This, as a matter of fact, is what happens with any two tones that form what is called a consonant interval with each other, an <> a <> or a <> If tones X and Y, for instance, are an octave apart, the second partial tone of X will be identical with the first of Y; if they are a fifth apart, the third partial tone of X will be identical with the second of Y; if they are a fourth apart, the fourth partial tone of X will correspond with the third of Y. It is obvious, then, that all these intervals will give us the sense of harmonic form; for they provide all the necessary conditions of a form, having enough in common to be associated by our minds, and enough not in common to be distinguished. When the partial tone in common is so high, and therefore so weak, that it impresses us but slightly, we shall have little or no sense of their being related; such is the case in the so-called imperfect consonances and the dissonances. When, on the other hand, all the most prominent partial tones of one exist in the other, they will fuse into one impression in our minds, losing the characteristic of form entirely, as is the case to some extent with the octave and entirely with the unison. But when, as in the case of fifths and fourths, there are both a distinctly audible partial tone in common and others not in common, then we shall have true harmonic forms.

So much technical detail will be forgiven by the reader who can at all realize how profoundly the entire history of music has been affected by these acoustic and physiological facts. We have already seen how folk-music slowly wrought out the complex metrical forms based upon time grouping. In the same way, ecclesiastical music wrought out, slowly and laboriously, the harmonic and melodic forms that were based upon pitch-grouping. For a long time vocal utterance was defined only by certain simple intervals like the fall of the fourth, which formed the cadences of Greek dramatic recitation and of mediaeval Christian intoning. Gradually ornamental notes were introduced as approaches to the final note; these were varied in pitch, and new ones added, until finally there resulted the ancient modes, precursors of our scale. Then, when two melodies began to be sung at once, the intervals of the octave, fifth, and fourth were again called into requisition, and made the bases of primitive harmony. In the old Organum of the Middle Ages, two voices, a fifth apart, gave the same melody, just as with the Greeks, in the process called <> two voices sang the same tune, an octave apart. So, step by step, pitch relations were perceived and utilized. In all stages of the long progress, whether the interval chosen was the octave or the fifth or the fourth, and whether the tones were sounded in succession as a melodic step or simultaneously as a chord, the guiding principle was the same; tones were grouped together which had pitch-form, which had partial tones in common and others not in common. A harmonic form, like a metrical form, was always a cluster of tones that could be both associated and distinguished.

Form in music, however, notwithstanding its origin as a means of defining those emotional expressions which without it would have remained vague, unimitable, and immemorable, is much more than a means of definition. At first practiced as a means to an end, it soon became an end in itself. For the perception of relations, the mental activity which groups impressions, is not merely useful; it is profoundly, indescribably delightful. Calling the mind into activity just as sensation calls the senses, it is a far deeper source of pleasure than sensation can ever be, because the mind far exceeds the senses in the subtlety, variety and independence of its action. When, therefore, the primitive musicians first made their syntheses of gestures and cries they discovered a novel pleasure, altogether more delicious than the crude joys of sensation and expression. Before they made such syntheses they had merely enjoyed the sweetness of tones, and taken satisfaction in expressing their feelings; but when once they learned to group their expressive tones together, to feel the subtle bonds which bound them into clear and salient unity, then they felt a joy altogether new and on a higher plane, they felt true aesthetic delight. Here was not merely a passive, or at most an automatic process; here was a truly creative activity, a conscious and free manipulation of materials. Mere hearing, however delicious, mere expression, however grateful, could not give this sense of mastery, of comprehension, of insight. Beauty alone, beauty depending on consciously made comparisons and contrasts, can give the highest aesthetic delight, the delight in form. And so, like painters who, using form at first to define their material, come quickly to a realization of its inherent value, and finally, if they be true artists, value its pure beauties of line and balance and composition more highly than any mere richness of color or of expression, musicians, in the degree of their true musicianship, came to prize the intrinsic beauty of music above all its other qualities.

Sometimes, doubtless, they carried their devotion too far. In certain periods and individuals the love of formal beauty has entirely eclipsed pleasure in expression. Unable to attend at once to expression and to beauty, many composers, and in some periods all, have devoted their entire energy to the quest for formal perfection. Thus in the work of the Netherland masters of early counterpoint, in some of Bach's ingenious weavings, and in much of the music of Haydn and his contemporaries, the search for purely plastic qualities goes on with little thought of the original emotional burden of the material that is being formulated. To such men form was much more than a means of defining expression; it was an end in itself, and an end worth a lifetime of painstaking, devoted effort.

And yet, justifiable as their feeling was, indispensable as their labors were to that development without which the expressive power of music would itself have remained rudimentary, it is not to their view, but to a more universal one, that we must look to find a rounded theory of expression and form. If it be a mistake to neglect the latter for the former, as they well saw, it is equally a mistake to prize form with too exclusive an enthusiasm. For beauty is itself one of the most potent means of expression. Our minds are not made up of hermetic compartments, but are so permeable, so conductive, that an eloquent thing is made more eloquent by being also beautiful. The impression of beauty reverberates endlessly, intensifying all that is associated with it. The general atmosphere transfigures every feature. If the whole is fair, no detail will be entirely without its appeal to our kindled imaginations, but if the whole is formless, no single phrase, however impassioned, can affect us very deeply. The truth is, then, that form and expression in music are as essential to each other as objects and light in the world of vision. No radiance of illumination will satisfy the eye if there is nothing to see, and, on the other hand, the loveliest things will give little pleasure in the dark. To be beautiful they must be suffused in light. Similarly the phrases of music, to be truly moving, must be suffused in beauty. The greatest masters clearly realized this. Bach in his masterpieces, Beethoven nearly always, and Brahms in his inspired hours, acted on the principle that the two elements must exist side by side, subtly and potently reacting upon each other. Their practice, indeed, unanimously confirms the theory of musical effect which has now been briefly sketched, and which may be more briefly summarized before we pass on to deduce from it some general canons of appreciation and criticism.

Music, we have seen, originates in the spontaneous gestures and cries made by primitive man under the sway of emotion, imitated by observers, and arousing in them the same feelings. As intelligence dawns, men see that this triple process of spontaneous action, imitation and reduplicated feeling affords a basis for a language of emotion, a language that needs, however, to be somehow defined and articulated. Articulation gradually follows by means of the grouping in time which develops the gestures of active feeling into Dance, and the grouping in pitch which develops the utterances of contemplative feeling into Song. Eventually the two modes of grouping are combined, and music becomes an independent art. Meanwhile, the forms at first adopted for the sake of mere definition become the basis of a new and deeper delight, aesthetic beauty, which is sought for both as ancillary to expression and for itself alone. Finally, beauty of form reacts potently on eloquence of expression, and the most universal composers, recognizing the interdependence of the two elements, produce the highest type of pure music, music in which beauty is based upon expression and expression transfigured by beauty.

The principles we now have before us, interesting as they are in themselves, must finally vindicate their worth by helping us to form sound opinions of musical tendencies and of individual composers; they must provide a corrective for the whims and freaks of prejudice, and a basis for that intelligent and systematic criticism which takes account both of a man's qualities and of his defects before assigning him his place in the general artistic movement. With them in mind, we should be able to avoid the current one-sided and partial views, and also to attain that positive insight into the nature of music which alone can give our opinions sanity, liberality and perspective.

It is a suggestive fact, however, that the sentimental attitude is found among us, not only in music, but everywhere. It is the tendency of the day to confuse acquiring with assimilating, to fancy that wealth of experience is better than self-mastery and intelligent possession. Heedlessness is our besetting sin. We skim books, <> picture galleries, talk at the opera, interrupt in conversation, and gobble our food. Metaphorically, as well as actually, we swallow more than we can digest, imagining that if we only subject ourselves to enough impressions we shall become connoisseurs. We value quantity rather than quality, in everything from bric-?-brac to education; and it is quite to be expected that we should reckon the value of music by the number of shivers it can give us. But we are nevertheless capable of a wiser attitude. We have it in us to learn that feelings are of no use until they are related to the central personality, that impressibility is not yet dignity, that to be informed is not necessarily to be educated--that, in a word, possession of any sort is not an external fact, but an inward control. We may take a facile interest in the sentimentalists and the enthusiasts--the people with <>--but at heart we know that those passions are deepest which are most firmly dominated by will, that he is freest who obeys the highest law, and that <> is after all less vital than character. We really prefer organization to coruscation. And so in music we are capable of learning, and knowledge of the principles of musical effect can help us to learn, that the balance and proportion and symmetry of the whole is far more essential than any poignancy, however great, in the parts. He best appreciates music who brings to it all of his human powers, who understands it intellectually as well as feels it emotionally.

In these and other ways the principles of musical effect afford touchstones for the detection of prevalent but erroneous views--views which contain their element of truth, but are still fallacious because partial. But the same principles are also capable of yielding more positive and detailed insight into the nature of musical appreciation. They illuminate, for example, that perplexing problem of expression--why it is that from the same piece of music one person gets so much more than another. The fact is familiar to every one. Every one knows that of two persons equally sensitive to music on the sensuous and formal side, of good <> and familiar with the effects of harmony, melody and rhythm, one will get far deeper meanings, will be far more elated and inspired, than the other. How can this be? Our theory of expression gives the clew. We have seen that bodily states set up by imitation are the basis of musical emotions. Hearing is always a sort of ideal performing. In listening to a melody we always feebly contract our throat muscles as if to sing, and the perception of rhythm is always accompanied by an incipient <> These bodily acts, however faintly realized, set up their appropriate feelings, the feelings we associate with their actual performance. But now it should be noted that the richness, quality, and significance of these feelings will depend in the case of each man on his particular associations--that is to say, on his entire personal character. Evoked by similar bodily states, the mental emotions will be always as dissimilar as the men who feel them. <> says Thoreau, <> He might truly have added that we cannot conceive of a greater difference than that between the feelings of one man and those of another in hearing the same piece of music, which excites in both the same tremors and thrills, but vistas of thought how utterly unlike! Musical appreciation is thus subject to the same variations which make the ordinary experiences of men so diverse. The prophet on fire with righteous indignation and the common scold undergo in anger the same suffusion of blood, the same boiling up of the organs; yet how different in dignity and value are their sentiments! And music, by setting up a certain sympathetic turmoil in the organs, will plunge one man into a selfish opium-dream and will fill another with the rarest, most magnanimous aspirations. It follows as a practical corollary that he who would get from music the best it has to offer must cultivate the best in himself. No fine sensibility in him, no large heroism, no generosity or dignity or profundity of character will be without its quiet, far-reaching effect on his appreciation of music.

If expression depends thus in part upon the moral and temperamental qualities of the listener, form in equal measure depends upon his mental alertness. <> says Dr. Santayana, <> This is unfortunately the case with many who consider themselves <>; they enjoy sweetness of sound and the rather vague emotion music arouses in them, but get no clear sense of its deeper architectural beauty. Like Charles Lamb, they are <> But a thoroughgoing love of music, as will be clear enough by now, must include an appreciation of all its aspects; and since beauty of form is not only delightful in itself, but is a potent means of expression as well, insensibility to it involves the loss of much of what is most precious in music. It is necessary, then, to train the attention, to listen accurately as well as sympathetically, to grasp the thematic phrases as they occur, to remember them when they recur, and to follow them through all their transformations. We should think that man but slightly appreciative of poetry who, after hearing a play of Shakespeare, should say that the words seemed to him mellifluous and that many passages moved him, but that he had not the slightest idea what it was all about. Yet how many of us, after hearing a Beethoven symphony, have the slightest definite idea what it is about? If we would get more than transient, profitless titillation from music, we must cultivate our attention, learning, to borrow a phrase from optics, <> As we progress in that faculty we shall constantly see new beauties, which in turn will constantly react to deepen expression; and if we are so fortunate as to have also a nature sensitive, tender, and earnest, fitted to feel the best kind of emotion that can be aroused by sound, we may hope to gain eventually an accurate, intelligent, and deep appreciation of music.

It remains, now that we have traced the bearing of our general principles on musical taste, to point out briefly how they afford also criteria for judging composers themselves, and how, thus judged, the six composers we are to study fall into perspective. Our principles, in a word, will now enable us to supplement our later studies of these composers in isolation with a somewhat rough but still helpful sense of their interrelationship. We must relate them to the general evolution of which they are phases; see how they differ in the power to assimilate the work of their predecessors, to avail themselves of all the resources, expressive and formal, of their art, and to develop new resources for those who succeed them. It is hardly necessary to insist on the value of some such basis of comparison. Without it we should be like a certain member of a college geology class who, more ardent than methodical, was wont to investigate outcrops and moraines with great enthusiasm, but in utter ignorance of the points of the compass. To this scatter-brained young man the instructor used always to say, <> And so, before examining the individual outcroppings of modern music, we shall do well to orient ourselves in the artistic landscape.

Of all the composers with whom we are to deal, Grieg and Dvo??k are the least inclusive and catholic. Grieg, as we shall see, writes always in the personal vein, is among musicians what Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb are among writers. He is intimate, charming, graceful, but never epic or universal. He touches the great stream of musical tradition at a few points only, and adds little to its volume. He knows how to combine a few elements of effect with finesse, but there are limitations both in what he has to say and in his means of saying it. He is familiar with only one dialect in the language of tones. And if Grieg is personal, Dvo??k is at most national. He is too deep-dyed a Bohemian to be a complete citizen of the world. Not only is his style curiously provincial, with its uneven rhythms of folk-song, its strong dance-like metrical schemes, and its florid coloring, but his substance is too ornate and too sweet to be profoundly significant. He is a <> musician raised to the n^ power, but he is not enough a scholar to relate himself very vitally with the general growth of his art. Both of these men have contributed much that is novel and charming to the lighter side of music, but they are not masters of deep feeling and wide scope.