checkered and tempest-tossed existence, and the music representing these moods is also a little outside the range of the purely beautiful.

In one department of the higher art of music—viz., that of symphony—there has been a working-out of the taste for the symmetric, the well proportioned, and the agreeable sounding; in other words, the beautiful as to proportion, charm of melody, and the satisfactory in harmony. In symphony the tragic and the extremely dramatic have had but a limited realization, while the purely beautiful in tonal relation has been the main creative motive. This we find in Mozart and Beethoven to a remarkable degree.

The general color of instrumental music, or its increasing complexity and high flavor, has been very much influenced by the writers of songs, as well as by the dramatic composers writing for the stage. There have been a few great geniuses in the art of music who, while gifted with a wide musical fantasy of their own, have taken pleasure in deriving their inspiration from poetry, and have occupied a large part of their time as creative composers in setting to music such lyric texts as interested them. In this way Schubert, for example, wrote something like 700 songs, Schumann a considerable number, and there have been various other composers who have written extensively in this line. The experience of the song-writer has, on the whole, been of great use to instrumental music, since it has tended not alone to diversify the music by encouraging a freer and more graphic employment of tonal forms, but also to retain the melody within the compass suitable to the voice and to preserve the agreeable proportions of phrases, such as we already find in poetic meters. Still, the fact remains that for intensification and for the extravagant element in the higher art of music, the dramatic composer is the influence mainly to be thanked, since in opera all these things are done upon so much larger a scale and with so much greater intensity.

It is not easy in words to point out how extremely large a factor in art-music is the operation of the unconscious. Instinct governed the operation of Bach and Beethoven almost as much as it does the swimming of the swan or the flying of the pigeon. For although the instinct of tonal relations is not one of those universal endowments shared by every individual to the same degree, there have appeared in the art of music a series of remarkable geniuses who seem to have had within themselves the power to turn all kinds of moods and experiences into musical expression. What part of this was due to fortunate heredity, and what to environment, and how much to original genius, pure and simple, it is impossible to say. The nature of genius always remains a mystery. At the same time, the currency which the music of these masters has gained in the world, and still maintains, goes to show that the instinct which governed them in putting together tonal forms for expressing delight, and for operating upon the feelings of the hearer, is not different in essence from that of the common listener; since experience shows that all this music affords gratification to the great majority of individuals who can be brought to listen to it a few times. Of course, it is not to be expected that a casual hearer, inattentive, it may be, and unaccustomed to remembering what he has heard, will be impressed by a long instrumental composition to the same degree as a practised hearer, and especially a hearer who has already followed the composition through several times before; but the longest symphony or sonata always contains a variety of moments which are intensely pleasing to the ordinary hearer listening seriously to them for the first time. The difference between the casual hearer and the more cultivated one is that with practice will come a perception of a larger number of these attractive moments, and finally, at last, the realization of the entire discourse as a one, having a central idea; in the same way as in a sermon a casual hearer notices here and there an idea which strikes him; then he goes off into reverie, and is only recalled by some other striking idea which attracts his attention, while the trained hearer may have followed the discourse entirely, and found it interesting from first to last.

Moreover, the repeated experience of hearing brings out in ordinary listeners a capacity which they had not previously realized—viz., the experience of feeling in connection with the music. We are still very far from understanding the relation between music and feeling. The most that is known about it as yet is that to a listener of even a very slight amount of experience the minor chord suggests unhappiness, while the major chord sounds brighter and more agreeable; a pleasant rhythm, somewhat lively, betokens cheerfulness; a slow and heavy rhythm betokens seriousness, perhaps sadness; but beyond this elementary beginning of musical feeling, which is common to the most insignificantly endowed individuality, there is a vast world of finer sensibilities connected with music. A certain chord, or succession of chords, or especially a certain melo-harmonic phrase, touches the sensitive ear with a peculiar thrill, and this happens over and over again, and continually in the more fortunate works of all the great masters, when followed by sympathetic hearers. The point in this connection which we have to notice is that the capacity of feeling to be touched and awakened by tonal incitations is practically universal as regards civilized man. The extent of the influence which music will exert varies enormously in individual cases, but from the fact that every normal hearer will be touched more and more by music with a little practice in hearing it; that the number of those who are extremely sensitive to this form of spiritual suggestion is much larger than is ordinarily supposed; and from the fact of this capacity in the average individual, and the universality of the admiration awakened by the works of the great geniuses in music, it is a fair conclusion that the future is destined to throw more light upon this obscure part of the psycho-musical capacity of mankind; and it is obvious, as said before, that the great geniuses whose works are demonstrated to contain this power to touch hearers had this endowment in an extraordinary degree, but not to such a degree as need place any bar upon the popular appreciation of their music, if a comparatively small amount of education has been given in hearing.

To sum up, then, the results arrived at in this discussion. The programs and discussions now about to be undertaken have been arranged for the purpose of assisting the listener to a recognition of the peculiarities and individual charms of the works of the masters represented, and also, incidentally, to afford the listener a certain education in the art of hearing, and, by bringing together strongly contrasted musical moments, to afford the musical feeling a strong incitation, in the hope of awakening in every listener this capacity of musical delight, when the sense of the beautiful and of the expressive is appealed to through exquisite tonal incitation.

All the music in these chapters, without exception, has been created upon musical grounds, since it is the instinctive following out of musical ideas which has operated through the greater part of them, while the pursuit of the highly dramatic and strongly marked has had but a small influence.

The higher musical fancy has many ways of expressing itself or of elaborating musical ideas, but there are two of its characteristic modes which the student will do well to observe at the start. These are what I call the "thematic" and the "lyric." The ordinary folk-song, which starts off with a melodic phrase, this phrase being partly answered, followed by a third phrase like the first, and then a final answer, is the general type of the lyric moment. The thematic is generally based upon a short phrase or melodic figure, and this figure is repeated over and over in a variety of ways and different chords and the like until a