alancing qualifications. I shall only attempt to put before you
what seem to me the most prominent considerations, and to throw out
suggestions which I hope you may perhaps, if sufficiently interested,
develop at leisure for yourselves.

In several ways the correlation of the musician with the non-musical
world is now more intimate and conscious than ever before. Forty or
fifty years ago--in spite of brilliant individual exceptions--musicians
were, in the main, self-centred craftsmen; they were inclined to drift
into a backwater, away from the chief currents of the intellectual, or
often indeed of the general artistic life of their day, and they seem on
the whole to have been content to have it so. In England we were
somewhat behindhand, no doubt, in our participation in the gradual but
steady change. But men like Parry and Stanford brought their profession
into close touch with the general culture of their contemporaries, and
made the universities and music understand each other; Grove, the first
director of the Royal College, himself a man whose professional career
(not to mention his amateur interests) had ended in music after ranging
through civil engineering, business organization, biblical archaeology,
and the editorship of a great literary magazine, preached with
infectious enthusiasm the new doctrine of the larger outlook; and for
the last thirty years, even if our practice may have occasionally seemed
somewhat to lag behind, at any rate our theory has not looked back.
Musicians have been granted their claim to be judged by the same
intellectual and moral standards as other reasonable people; it is a
modest claim, but, especially in England, it has had to be fought for.

And the entry on this wider heritage, which English musicians, apart
from an exception or two such as Pierson and Bennett, won for the first
time a generation ago, has had in every country a definite influence on
composition, especially (as is only natural) on the composer's attitude
towards the musical setting of literature. I should be far from saying
that any modern is a greater song-writer than Schubert; but it is
obvious that the followers of Wolf and Duparc and Moussorgsky are aiming
at something different. They may not express the general mood of the
poem more faithfully, but they certainly attach more importance to its
lyrical structure and to flexibly expressive diction: they accept the
poet as an equal colleague. The serious song-write