as not get them quite wrong; he may indeed indulge the habit of realistic suspicion to such an extent as to make him become thoughtlessly unfair and credit the composer with sins of taste, whether babyish or pathological, of which the objurgated culprit may be altogether innocent.  If a composer plays with fire, he is fairly sure to burn some one’s fingers, even if he successfully avoids burning his own.  And anyhow it is waste of time, and worse, for us to cudgel our brains to fits of entirely unnecessary inventiveness when the composer has left his music unlabelled.  We sometimes hear of children being encouraged to give verbal or dramatic expression of their own to instrumental music; that is not education—­very much the reverse.  It is merely the expense of spirit in a waste of fancifulness, the wilful murder of all feeling for music as such.

The feeling for music as such, that is still the one thing needful.  And by this canon, so it seems to me, we must judge all these alarums and excursions of modern composers.  If we hold firmly by it, we shall not be unduly worried when we learn that the music which seems so perfectly to realize the composer’s expressed meaning has been originally designed by him quite otherwise—­as has happened oftener than is generally known; though this fact does not excuse wilful contradictions of a composer’s definite intentions, as in the vulgar perversion of Rimsky-Korsakoff’s Scheherezade popularized by the latest fashionable toy, the Russian Ballet, which would do more musically unexceptionable service were it to confine itself to works specially designed for it, such as the fascinating and finely-wrought scores of Stravinsky, or concert works like Balakireff’s Thamar, based on programmes that can be mimetically reproduced without unfaithfulness.  And anyhow, in the midst of all these appeals to the eye or the literary memory or what not, we may call to mind the simple truth that music is something to be heard with either the inward or the outward ear, and if we are too much distracted otherwise, our hearing sense suffers.  We shall pay too high a price for our latter-day correlation of music with literature and the other arts if the music itself has to play the part of Cinderella.  ’We do it wrong, being so majestical.’

Again, we may endeavour to correlate recent musical development with the development of the conceptions of nationality and race.  With nationality in the strictly political sense music has, indeed, nothing to do:  there is no inborn musical expression common to all the inhabitants of Switzerland, or the United States, or the British Empire (or indeed the British Islands).  And if we abandon political nationality entirely and think of national music solely in terms of race, we still have to make very large deductions.  Heredity counts, it would seem, for far less than environment in musical development—­especially so in these days of free intercourse.  Nevertheless, we may to some extent isolate the racial element; and within the last generation increasingly vigorous efforts have been made to do so—­though they have perhaps neglected sufficiently to observe that racial ancestry is often an extremely mixed quantity.