This advance of the conception of racialism has widened and intensified music in not a few ways.  It has brought to our knowledge many splendid melodies, infinitely varied in design and emotional range, and, at their best, inspirations that the greatest composers would have been proud to sign.  And, mixed as are the feelings with which we must contemplate the general course of our own musical history, we can anyhow boast of some of the finest folk-tunes in existence in these relics of the old world on its last western fringes, in Ireland and the Hebrides.  We have come to see that this great mass of traditional music—­only in part, of course, the outpouring of sheer genius, but at its worst sincere—­is, with its appeal alike to the child and the adult, either in years or in musical culture, the most perfect educational weapon yet devised with which to combat all the forces that make for musical degradation.  And, apart from all this half-unconsciously wrought music, we have been shown the value of the bypaths in art, of the work of the great men of the younger races like the Scandinavians and the Czechs and most of all the Russians, who do not speak the older classical tongues but have, all the same, abundance to say that is well worth the whole world’s hearing.  It is to our immense gain that we have now come, far more than ever before, to realize that in the house of music there are many mansions.  And, once again, we have been taught the duty of being fair to the men of our own blood, past and present.  Particularly in our own artistic history there has been visible a strongly marked tendency, such as no other nation has shown in equal measure, to neglect and depreciate native work in comparison with foreign, even when the latter might perhaps be worse.  But I think we may say, without self-laudation, that British composition is now worth some considerable attention from ourselves and others; it was, not unnaturally, wellnigh forgotten during its sleep from the death of Purcell till the rise of Parry—­a fairly sound sleep, during which it occasionally half-opened its eyes for a moment or two—­but it is wide awake now.  We are still slow to learn the lesson; but we have come to realize, at any rate theoretically, the duty of doing what we can, in the spirit not of favouritism but of justice and knowledge, to disprove the proverb that a prophet (and an artist also) has no honour in his own country and in his father’s house.

So much to the good.  But to-day, more than ever before, many voices are urging us to go farther—­and, I think, to fare worse.  Artistic racialism has always been spontaneous, so far as the art is great.  No composer who is worth anything can be dragooned into being patriotic:  he will go his own way.  Some are attracted more than others by the general types of phrase or the general emotional moods exemplified in the folk-music of their own race; but that is a matter for neither credit nor discredit.  Individuality