not on technical knowledge or executive skill, but on the responsive temperament and the will to understand.  Familiarity, familiarity at home if possible, is the key to this understanding; and in this connexion there is, I believe, an enormous educational future before pianolas and gramophones, if only the preparation of their records can be taken in hand on artistic rather than narrowly commercial lines.  And our standards of judgement have risen:  we do not worship quite so blindly mere names, whether of the past or of the present, nor exalt the performer quite so dizzily above what is performed.  Nor do we quite so glibly disguise our indifference to vital distinctions by talking about differences of taste:  we know that, however catholic we may rightly be within the limits of the good, whether grave or gay, there comes sooner or later, in our judgement of musical as of all other spiritual values, a point where we must put our foot down.  We are going on, and our theories are sound enough:  but the path of a democratically widened, and rightly so widened, art is by no means easy.  The principle of levelling up slides so readily into the practice of levelling down:  and the book of music is closed once for all if we are to accept the plenary inspiration of majorities.

But here in England the greatest danger to musical progress is, I venture to think, the self-styled practical Englishman—­fortified as he is by the consciousness that, for at any rate a couple of centuries or more, we have as a nation taken a low view of the arts and have been rather proud of it than otherwise.  It is so obvious that no profession is economically more unsound than that of the serious composer:  it is not so obvious that we owe all the great things of the spirit by which we chiefly live to those whom the world calls dreamers, among whom the great musicians have had, and, I hope and believe, will always have, no mean place.  Against the ‘practical Englishman’, and all that his attitude to music involves, we can all of us fight in our respective spheres:  and I would commend to you for useful weapons three very different books by very different men—­Sir Hubert Parry’s great book on Style in Musical Art, Mr. C.T.  Smith’s account of his artistic work in an elementary school in the East End of London which he calls The Music of Life, and a pamphlet Starved Arts mean Low Pleasures recently written by Mr. Bernard Shaw for the British Music Society.  And one particular line of indirect attack, easily open to all of us, is, I am inclined to think, specially promising.  In the third and fourth verses of the thirty-fifth chapter of the book of Ecclesiasticus we shall find these injunctions, which I translate as literally as Greek epigrams can be translated:  ’Do not hinder music:  do not pour out chatter during any artistic performance:  and do not argue unseasonably.’  In other words, conversation, however valuable, prevents complete listening to music; and music that is not meant to be listened to in its completeness is not worth calling music, and had much better not be there at all.  Musical progress will be spiritually well on its way when we all realize this axiomatic truth as firmly as this Hebrew sage of two thousand years and more ago.