Now, there is only one thing easier than a generalisation, and that is a generalisation in the opposite direction.  You can prove anything by statistics, if you can only choose your statistics and stop when you want to.  But statistics are like automobiles.  Sometimes if you hitch yourself up with a statistic, you meet the fate of the farmer who put his fool head in the yoke with a skittish steer.

There was a time when I could have written you an essay on the moral effect of music, and been convinced, if not convincing.  A little later, I could have done no worse with a thesis to the effect that music is an immoral influence.  But that time is gone now, after a time spent in gathering material from everywhichway for this book on musicians’ love affairs.  For, to repeat, with a few statistics you can prove anything; with a complete array you can usually prove nothing, or its next-door neighbour.

The way to test any food is to observe its effects on those addicted to it.  To study the true workings of music, then, you would not count the pulse of one of those “Oh-I’m-passionately-fond-of-music” maidens who talk all through even dance-music.  Nor would you take for your test one of those laymen who are fond of this tune or that, because it reminds them of the first time they heard it—­“that night when Sally Perkins sang it while I was out in the moonlit piazza hugging Kitty Gray, now Mrs. van Van,—­or was it Bessie Brown? who buried her husband two years ago next Sunday.”

These are people to whom music is as much a rarity as Nesselrode to a newsboy.

The true place, surely, to test the effect of music is in the souls of the people who live in it, breathe it, steep themselves in it, play it,—­and what is worse,—­work it.

To the great musicians themselves, then, we have turned.  What could have been better for the purpose than to have made them parade before us in historic mardi-gras? wearing their hearts on their sleeves, or in their letters, their music, their lives, as they trooped forth endlessly from the tomes of Burney, Hawkins, Fetis, Grove, Riemann, and from their biographies and memoirs innumerable?

A motley crew they have formed, and you perhaps have been able to find a unity, if not of purpose, at least of result, in the music they have made, and the music that has made them.  Let them pass again, only this time as soldiers go by at a review—­the second time at the double-quick.  Here they come—­watch them well.

Leading the rout are those stately or capering figures, who, from being the great virtuosi of their time, were finally idolised into gods in the Golden Age, when musical critics had no columns to perpetuate their iconoclasms in.

Mark him with the stately stride—­Apollo, smiting his lyre with a majesty hardly supported by the seven small notes he could get out of it.  The gossips said he loved Daphne, and madly withal, but she took to a tree.—­No, let the gods pass as they will.  It is with men we deal, not gods.