by the doctors:  they could not understand the freer style of harmony which prevailed before the strict school came into existence.  Artemus Ward, taking up Chaucer, professed amazement to find spelling that would not be tolerated in an elementary school; the learned doctors, taking up Byrde, found he had disregarded all the rules—­rules, be it remembered, formulated after Byrde’s time, just as our modern rules of spelling were made after Chaucer’s time; and as Artemus Ward jocularly condemned Chaucer, and showed his wit in the joke, so the doctors seriously condemned Byrde, and showed their stupidity in their unconscious joke.  They could understand one side of Tallis.  His motet in forty parts, for instance:  they knew the difficulties of writing such a thing, and they could see the ingenuity he showed in his various ways of getting round the difficulties.  They could not see the really fine points of the forty-part motet:  the broad scheme of the whole thing, and the almost Handelian way of massing the various choirs so as to heap climax on climax until a perfectly satisfying finish was reached.  Still, there was something for them to see in Tallis; whereas in Byrde there was nothing for them to see that they had eyes to see, or to hear that they had ears to hear.  They could see that he either wrote consecutive fifths and octaves, or dodged them in a way opposed to all the rules, that he wrote false relations with the most outrageous recklessness, that his melodies were irregular and not measured out by the bar; but they could not feel, could not be expected to feel, the marvellous beauty of the results he got by his dodges, the marvellous expressiveness of his music.  These old doctors may be forgiven, and, being long dead, they care very little whether they are forgiven or not.  But the modern men who parrot-like echo their verdicts cannot and should not be forgiven.  We know now that the stiff contrapuntal school marked a stage in development of music which it was necessary that music should go through.  The modern men who care nothing for rules—­for instance Wagner and Tschaikowsky—­could not have come immediately after Byrde; even Beethoven could not have come immediately after Byrde and Sweelinck and Palestrina, all of whom thought nothing of the rules that had not been definitely stated in their time.  Before Beethoven—­and after Beethoven, Wagner and all the moderns—­could come, music had to go through the stiff scientific stage; a hundred thousand things that had been done instinctively by the early men had to be reduced to rule; a science as well as an art of music had to be built up.  It was built up, and in the process of building up noble works of art were achieved.  After it was built up and men had got, so to say, a grip of music and no longer merely groped, Beethoven and Wagner went back to the freedom and indifference to rule of the first composers; and the mere fact of their having done so should show us that the rules were nothing in themselves, nothing, that is, save