however widespread it may become, is not necessarily advance in the scale of values.  There is, somewhere or other, a limit to the cubic capacity of things:  they cannot increase indefinitely in depth and breadth at once.  We may confidently hope that we have not yet musically come within hailing distance of the limit:  but nevertheless it is becoming more and more difficult to see music steadily and see it whole, and it is useful to take stock of our position.  Our musical minds are very much broader than they were:  in that sense we can well, like the heroes of Homer, boast that we are much better than our fathers.  But are they also deeper?  We have gained access to many new rooms in the house of art, rooms full of strange and beautiful things, for the knowledge of which we must needs be profoundly and lastingly grateful; but some of the rooms seem rather small and their windows do not seem to have been opened very often, while others seem liable to be swept by hurricanes which upset the furniture right and left.  Veterans there are, musicians not to be named except with high honour, who fall back for nutriment on the great classics and pessimism; but our notions of beauty cannot stand still, and in all ages of music one of the most vital tasks of criticism has been to distinguish between the relatively non-beautiful which has character and truth and its superficial imitation which has neither.  All musicians very well recollect their first bewilderment at what has afterwards become as clear as daylight.  But we must retain our standards of judgement.  We have no right to criticize without familiarity, but we must remember that over-familiarity, mere dulled habitual acceptance, means equal incapacity for criticism.  If, after trying our utmost, we still cannot see any sense in some of these modernist pages, there is no reason why we should not say so; it is quite possible that there really is no sense in them, and that the composer is perfectly aware of the fact.  Odd stories float about the artistic world.  And if the anarchists call us philistines and the philistines call us anarchists, it is fairly likely that we are seeing things pretty much as they are.

Moreover, it is worth remembering that a good deal of what is loosely called modernism is in reality very much the reverse.  There is nothing progressive in the confusion of processes with principles, in the breathless disregard of the larger issues.  Take the ideal of ’direct expression of emotion’, the attempt to give, as Pater said half a century ago, ’the highest quality to our moments as they pass and simply for those moments’ sake’.  Musically, it is a return to the childhood of our race, to the natural savage.  If a musical composition is to consist of anything more than one isolated noise, it must inevitably have a form of some kind, its component parts must look backward and forward.  The latter-day composers who speak of Form as a kind of bogey that they have at last exorcized remind us of those latter-day