director of the Royal College, himself a man whose professional career (not to mention his amateur interests) had ended in music after ranging through civil engineering, business organization, biblical archaeology, and the editorship of a great literary magazine, preached with infectious enthusiasm the new doctrine of the larger outlook; and for the last thirty years, even if our practice may have occasionally seemed somewhat to lag behind, at any rate our theory has not looked back.  Musicians have been granted their claim to be judged by the same intellectual and moral standards as other reasonable people; it is a modest claim, but, especially in England, it has had to be fought for.

And the entry on this wider heritage, which English musicians, apart from an exception or two such as Pierson and Bennett, won for the first time a generation ago, has had in every country a definite influence on composition, especially (as is only natural) on the composer’s attitude towards the musical setting of literature.  I should be far from saying that any modern is a greater song-writer than Schubert; but it is obvious that the followers of Wolf and Duparc and Moussorgsky are aiming at something different.  They may not express the general mood of the poem more faithfully, but they certainly attach more importance to its lyrical structure and to flexibly expressive diction:  they accept the poet as an equal colleague.  The serious song-writer can hardly any longer, like Schumann in his setting of Heine’s ’Das ist ein Floeten und Geigen’, afford to stultify great poetry by quoting from memory and getting the adjectives deplorably wrong.  Nor can he, like Beethoven in ‘Adelaide’ and the ‘Entfernte Geliebte’ cycle, let himself weave musical structures many sizes too large for the proper structure of the words, which have consequently to be repeated over and over again with very little regard for poetical or even common sense.  Schumann and Beethoven, especially the former, were culturally very far from narrow-minded men; but there was not in their days any general cultural pressure sufficiently strong to influence them as composers.  Now, the pressure is so strong that few can resist.  Most composers have now fully learned their lesson of a fitting politeness towards their poet-colleagues—­learned it in the main, so far as not intuitively, from the high examples set by Wolf and the modern French school—­and have, moreover, come to recognize the duty of setting such words as may be fit not only to be sung but to be read, a duty shockingly neglected by many of the greatest geniuses in musical history.

And the cultural pressure has gone farther than this.  Not only has the increasing complexity of life broadened the musician’s personal outlook, professional or unprofessional:  it has also modified, whether for better or for worse, the outlook of the music itself.  We may conveniently divide all music into two great classes:  ‘absolute’ music, in which the composer appeals to the listener