o see the precise need of such reaction. The radical
cause is probably a kind of inertia in all things human, by which the
accepted is thought the only way. Rules spring up that are never wholly
true; at best they are shifts to guide the student, inadequate
conclusions from past art. The essence of an art can never be put in
formulas. Else we should be content with the verbal form. The best
excuse for the rule is that it is meant to guard the element of truth in
art from meretricious pretence.

And, we must not forget, Art progresses by slow degrees; much that is
right in one age could not come in an earlier, before the intervening
step.

The masters, when they had won their spurs, were ever restive under
rules.[A] Yet they underwent the strictest discipline, gaining early the
secret of expression; for the best purpose of rules is liberation, not
restraint. On the other hand they were, in the main, essentially
conservative. Sebastian Bach clung to the older manner, disdaining the
secular sonata for which his son was breaking the ground.

[Footnote A: Some of the chance sayings of Mozart (recently edited by
Kerst-Elberfeld) betray much contempt for academic study: "Learning from
books is of no account. Here, here, and here (pointing to ear, head, and
heart) is your school." On the subject of librettists "with their
professional tricks," he says: "If we composers were equally faithful to
our own rules (which were good enough when men knew no better), we
should turn out just as poor a quality in our music as they in their
librettos." Yet, elsewhere, he admits: "No one has spent so much pains
on the study of composition as myself. There is hardly a famous master
in music whom I have not read through diligently and often."]

The master feels the full worth of what has been achieved; else he has
not mastered. He merely gives a crowning touch of poetic message, while
the lighter mind is busy with tinkering of newer forms. For the highest
reaches of an art, the poet must first have grasped all that has gone
before. He will not rebel before he knows the spirit of the law, nor
spend himself on novelty for its own sake.

The line between the Master and the Radical may often seem vague. For,
the former has his Promethean strokes, all unpremeditated, compelled by
the inner sequence,--as when Beethoven strikes the prophetic drum in the
grim Scherzo of the Fifth Symphony; or in the Eroica when the horn
sounds sheer ahead, out of