thinkers who boast that they have abolished metaphysics.  We cannot leap off our shadows; if we try, we shall only find that we are left with a residuum of bad metaphysics or bad musical form—­as thoroughly bad as the metaphysics and the musical form that have resulted from the confusion of the one with empty word-spinning and of the other with hide-bound pedantry.  Again, much of the modern rhythmical complexity strongly resembles, in essence, the machine-made experiments of mediaeval times; and the peculiarly fashionable trick of shifting identical chords up and down the scale—­the clothes’-peg conception of harmony, so to speak—­is a mere throw-back still farther, to Hucbald and the diaphony of a thousand years ago.  And the insistence, now so common, on the decorative side of music, the conscious preference of the sensuous to the intellectual or emotional elements, brings us back to our own infancy, with its unreflecting delight in things that sparkle prettily or are soft to the touch or sweet to the taste.  It is a reaction from sentimentality, no doubt, but is a reaction to an equal extreme, a perversion of the truth that great art never wholly gives itself away.  As Vincent d’Indy has justly pointed out, the ’sensualist formula’—­’all for and by harmony’—­is as much an aberration of good sense as the parallel formula of the ultra-melodic schools of Rossini and Donizetti:  in either case it means the sacrifice of spaciousness to immediate effect, the supremacy of sensation over the equilibrium of the heart and the intelligence.  Not of course that any music lacks the sensuous element; but it is a matter of proportion.  And very distinguished as are many of the modern exponents of this side of things, history tells us, I think, that they are working in a blind alley.  They have their supporters, no doubt.  M. Jean-Aubry, in his very suggestive and valuable book on modern French musicians, has used a phrase that seems to me worth remembering; he speaks of the ‘obsession of intellectual chastity’ which, to his mind, disfigures the work of Cesar Franck and other great composers whom he therefore rejects from his latter-day Pantheon.  I am glad to think that Franck would have gloried in this shame.  He, and a very goodly company with him, knew that music was, at its highest, something better than an entertainment, however thrilling or however refined.

But, whatever critics and composers may feel about musical progress, it is, as Wagner said, in the home of the amateur that music is really kept alive, and the amateur’s music depends very largely on the schools.  A generation ago music was certainly sociologically selfish.  Musicians had not realized that all classes of the community were open to the influences of fine music, if only they had the opportunities for knowing it.  But since then there have been very great advances, both quantitative and qualitative, in musical education.  We have spread it broadcast, in the increasing faith that appreciation depends,