the new tarantulism, which has invaded Europe from the half-civilised West. Music has no place in this manifestation, to which, indeed, it is hostile rather than helpful. Mr Mendl's volume 'The Appeal of Jazz' discusses syncopated time and jazz noises both as separate facts and as a combination. We confess to having read a chapter or two with some little surprise until we discerned that the book is like Samuel Butler's 'Fair Haven,' an insidious attack delivered in the form of a defence. We are not suggesting for a moment that Mr Mendl is a Samuel Butler, either in intellectual wickedness or in literary skill; but on a lower level his ironical method is the same. Perhaps he gives himself away too easily. His arguments are at times so feeble and contradictory that his book fails through his own good intentions.

Indeed, as we have said, the plain man must be given better books on music, if he is to be converted to their use. Actually he will get much more profit from listening to music itself in his own simple way. Music is the plain man's art. It is the most instant and universal in its appeal. We are cradled in song, and pass onwards to 'the sunset hour and music at the close' until we 'hear no more at all.' And, in a special sense, music is the rightful inheritance of Englishmen. A Merry England may have been a pleasant fancy; a Musical England was an indubitable fact. In the fullest age of our history, Elizabethan gentlemen sang in consort or listened to a chest of viols, as they mitigated piracy with piety on the grand scale. Let us call in evidence the greatest man of the time. The air of the Shakespearean world is as full of song as of light and life. The characters of Shakespeare make music or get it made for them as a normal activity of life. Play me some merry dump to comfort me,' cries the honest serving-lad, when Juliet seems to die. It is a human cry, the cry of Everyman, as Shakespeare well knew. Not long ago a newspaper made a song (in the journalistic sense) about the fact that a man in a bus conductor's uniform had been discovered listening to Beethoven at a Promenade Concert. The astonishment is the measure of our fall from greatness. Neither Shakespeare nor Sidney would have found anything strange in a musical workman.

Nor

would Samuel Pepys. What is there to prevent an intelligent artisan from delighting in the G minor Symphony of Mozart, except the false terrors which our musical Pharisees have thrown round the words 'Mozart,' 'symphony,' and 'classical'? The plain man has had to suffer from the tyranny of those who sat with the stern face of duty through years of oratorio at Exeter Hall, and threatened with their displeasure those who were detected in the enjoyment of anything 'secular.' The dispensers of musical charity-blankets, taking refuge (as always) in generalities, laid it down that some abstraction called 'the oratorio' was better for us than another abstraction called 'the comic opera'; and so they believed that Sullivan had misused his talents in writing frivolous music, and said so quite plainly in the obituaries.

Now this is a point on which we can be quite definite and precise. Sullivan did not debase or misuse his talents. 'The Mikado' is better music than 'The Martyr of Antioch,' and 'The Gondoliers' is at least as good as 'The Golden Legend.' Devotees of the oratorio are welcome to 'The Woman of Samaria' and 'The Martyrdom of St Polycarp' as long as the plain man can have 'The Barber of Seville' and 'The Marriage of Figaro.' Those who can enjoy the jollity of Bach are those who will most enjoy his majesty; those who can enjoy the gaiety of Beethoven are those who will most enjoy his profundity. What frightens the plain man away from 'classical music' is the solemn humbug which has been accumulated around it by bad, incompetent, or insincere writers and talkers. Any person, in any class of society, possessing ordinary intelligence, and not suffering from the rare aural deformity called 'no ear for music,' can enjoy thoroughly and habitually the best works of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, whom we may regard as the typical classics. That, as a general proposition, is simply and unquestionably true. very real sense there is no such thing as classical music,' save in chronology. Whatever meaning the term may have had is now lost in popular speech. A lady was overheard giving to another her impressions of Stravinsky's 'Le Sacre du Printemps.' 'My dear,' exclaimed, 'you would not like it at all. It's frightfully

In a

she

classical.' And recently a doctor in New York has compiled some figures about the effect of music on hospital patients. The music was administered in three strengths, 'Classical,' 'Popular,' Mixed.' It is the kind of classification that one would expect from a doctor in New York. Music is divisible into 'classical' and 'popular' only in the sense in which golf or bridge is divisible into 'classical' and 'popular.' The New York doctor might as sensibly divide his diseases into 'serious' and 'infectious.'

But here the plain man may interpose a question: 'Don't people have to be educated up to high-class music?' The answer (which should not be shirked or qualified) is, 'Yes, certainly; all people, except those unusually gifted, have to be educated up to every sort of fine enjoyment.' Nearly all true enjoyment is educated enjoyment. Analogy is not proof; but examples can be properly drawn from other regions of pleasure. A man cannot enjoy classical verse until he has been educated up to it. A man whose acquaintance with billiards is limited to a bare recognition of tables, balls, and cues has to be educated up to the enjoyment of a match between champions. A man who does not understand cricket has to be educated up to the enjoyment of a match at Lord's. A man who has smoked nothing but bad cigarettes has to be educated up to the enjoyment of a fine Havana. A man who has lived contentedly in dirt and coarseness has to be educated up to the enjoyment of personal cleanness and fresh air. Indeed, it may be taken as a general rule that life rarely gives us something for nothing. What is required of living, intelligent beings is co-operation, not passivity. The sheep on the hillside ignore the rolling scene before them as they nibble the grass at their feet. The ability of sheep to co-operate is limited. But a sheep-dog can co-operate intelligently and joyously in the shepherd's work, and we hold him, therefore, a higher being than the sheep which alternate between insensate browsing and insensate stampedes. The intelligence of man is measured by his ability to co-operate in the natural activities of life. Let us declare, then, without apology or hesitation, that people have to be educated up to full enjoyment of the best music, and let us, for the moment,

rule out the people who like to eat and talk to a noise, the name, nature, and quality of the noise being of as little account to them as the name, nature, and quality of the food they consume. Many a bad sole has escaped condemnation through the intervention of a band.

How, then, shall the plain man be educated up' to the best music? He educates himself by listening intelligently. He learns to enjoy by the very act of enjoyment. But he must give music a chance. He gives games a chance. He is humble and patient with golf; he does not throw up tennis after his first set; he does not abandon billiards after failing with his first cannon. If he is willing to give games a chance he should at least give the arts a chance. Why should a man who knows he must take bridge seriously feel aggrieved if he is told he must take Brahms seriously? There is an athleticism in appreciation. Minds, like bodies, respond to practice. The plain man should give music a chance by listening to it sensibly and without prejudice. His main purpose should be simply to acquire a new enjoyment, and he should listen in that spirit. He need not tease himself with musical terms. The understanding of musical form is not necessary to a first enjoyment of music. Certainly music cannot be enjoyed as form unless it has been enjoyed as experience. And the plain man should be clear on another point, namely, that there is no special virtue in a particular form. A good sonata is not enjoyable because it is a sonata, but because it is good: there are plenty of bad sonatas. A good oratorio is not to be admired because it is an oratorio, but because it is good: the musical warehouses contain several tons of bad oratorios. To call a work a concerto or a symphony does not entitle it to an atom of respect. If it is to be enjoyed it must prove that it is a good concerto or symphony. A concerto is simply a piece for a solo instrument accompanied by a band. A symphony is simply three or four pieces, in a certain order, played by a band. There is neither virtue nor terror in the name. The man who thinks that all concertos are good is musically in the same position as the man who thinks all concertos are bad.

If the plain man listens intelligently to a piece of

well-written music, he will presently become aware of two main factors in its composition. These factors we may call, by analogy, pattern and texture; and upon the quality of pattern and texture the beauty of music depends. These factors, of course, do not exist separately -the pattern is expressed in texture and the texture embodies the pattern, just as in poetry, rhythm has no separate beauty apart from the words that embody it. Moreover, the terms pattern and texture imply something static, whereas the essence of music is movement -the patterned texture of sound being in living motion, the very motion making the pattern. Nevertheless, pattern and texture are there, and form the body of any piece of music, whether it is 'pure,' like Bach's Chaconne, or applied' (i.e., dramatic), like Wagner's Fire Music. No music, whether the most modern or the most ancient, can exist without pattern and texture. The 'expressionist' makes pattern of a sort in the very attempt to avoid it. The hearer, then, does not listen to arbitrary and unrelated noises; he traces the living 'figure in the carpet' as the shimmering web of sound unrolls before him, and finds intellectual as well as spiritual pleasure in the artistic governance of the whole. But this intellectual and this spiritual pleasure are one, and their home is the imaginative reason. In music, singularly, the expression and the expressed are one. That is why some find it difficult. When you hear the 'Crucifixus' of the B minor Mass, although the words announce a fact, you cannot separate what is said musically from the musical way of saying it, for they are indivisible; the pattern and texture of sound do not have meaning, they are meaning; and the soul of the hearer responds as it never could to a description or a picture or a discussion of the physical event. Let the plain man shut his ears impenetrably, therefore, to the people who try to give music a 'meaning,' who try to make a pattern of pure sound paint a picture, or tell a story, or convey information, or discuss moral problems. Music does and can do no such thing. Music is music; it is not poetry or painting or architecture or sculpture or metaphysics or theology or anything whatsoever but music. The more a plain man tries to give music a meaning, the less it will mean to him. The people who declare oracularly