h, the "Day in the Country," in which the sun rises
in the high notes, cocks crow, horses rattle down the road,
merrymakers frolic on the green, clouds come up in the horns,
lightning plays in the violins, thunder crashes in the drums and
cymbals, the merrymakers scatter in the whole orchestra, the storm
passes diminuendo, and in the muted violins the full moon rises
serenely into a twilight sky. Here the intention is easily understood;
the layman cannot fail to recognize what the composer wanted to
say. And as in the case of pictures which interest the beholder
because he can translate their subject into the terms which are his
own medium of expression, that is, words, so with descriptive music,
broadly speaking, the interest and significance is literary and not
musical. Still another parallel is presented. Just as those pictures are
popular whose subjects lie within the range of familiar experience,
such as cows by the shaded pool, or children playing, or whose
subjects touch the feelings; so, that music is popular which is
phrased in obvious and familiar rhythms such as the march and the
waltz, or which appeals readily and unmistakably to sentiment and
emotion. It is after the lover of music has traversed these passages of
musical expression and has proved their imitations that he comes to
seek in music new ranges of experience, unguessed-at possibilities
of feeling, which the composer has himself sounded and which he
would communicate to others. He is truly the artist only as he leads
his auditors into regions of beautiful living which they alone and of
themselves had not penetrated. For it is then that his work reveals.

Only such pictures, too, will have a vital meaning as reveal. The
imitative and the iterative alike, that which adds nothing to the
object and that which adds nothing to the experience of the beholder,
though once pleasing, now fail to satisfy. The appreciator calls for
something fuller. He wants to pass beyond the object, beyond his
experience of it, into the realm of illumination whither the true artist
would lead him. The development of appreciation, as the amateur
has come to realize in his own person, is only the enlargement of
demand. The appreciator requires ever fresh revelations of beauty.
He discovers, too, that in practice the tendency of his development is
in the direction of exclusion. As he goes on, he cares for fewer and
fewer things, because those works which can minister to his
ev