self-styled upper classes of a few countries, is now supposed to be able to take care of itself, so the blood in a composer’s veins will, if his music is worth anything, be able to take care of itself also?  Neither honour nor artistic personality is affectable by external considerations which are on a different plane of value.  And music indeed is the most specifically international, or supernational, of all the arts; it has not, like literature, any barriers of language, nor, like painting or sculpture or architecture, any local habitation.  Musical separatism is not a natural quality; it needs careful and continuous fostering.  And I know from personal experience that, all through the war, there was no difficulty at all in carrying on concerts in the programmes of which works by living German composers, and songs in the German language, were included in their due proportions just as before.

Another great factor in modern European thought with which I would attempt to correlate music is the factor of religion.  No one will deny that the last generation has seen profoundly important changes in religious thought:  whatever may have been the eddies and backwaters, the main stream has run, and still runs, like a cataract.  These changes may be very differently judged by different types of men, all of them equally firm believers in the supremacy of spiritual ideals:  some may definitely regret, some may, with the help of such conceptions as that of progressive revelation, steer a middle course, some (among whom I would number myself) may definitely welcome.  But in whatever light we may regard these radical refusals of the old allegiances, we shall naturally expect to find their influence in music, which has had in many ways so intimate a connexion with religion.  Indeed, the conception of music as in some special way the handmaid of religion dies very hard.  It is still possible, in April 1919, for distinguished musicians, when appealing for funds for the foundation of a professorship of ecclesiastical music, to put their names to the statement that ’the church will always be the chief home and school of music for the people’[71]:  and this when the facts about attendances at places of worship have long been familiar.  We must rate the influence of church music more modestly; it has a great influence in its own sphere, but its sphere is only one among many.

We may, I think, envisage this religious development on its practical side as a process of differentiation by which the sincere standers in the old and the middle and the new paths have little by little drawn apart intellectually—­but not, in societies that are happily able to take broad views of human nature, otherwise than intellectually—­not only from each other but still more from those who, whatever their ostensible labels, are in reality followers of Gallio and routine.  And something like the same process is observable in the religious music of the past generation.  Many of its old conventions