usical sympathy from the listener, he defeats his own end.
The listener will inevitably concentrate on the unessentials, and will
as likely as not get them quite wrong; he may indeed indulge the habit
of realistic suspicion to such an extent as to make him become
thoughtlessly unfair and credit the composer with sins of taste, whether
babyish or pathological, of which the objurgated culprit may be
altogether innocent. If a composer plays with fire, he is fairly sure to
burn some one's fingers, even if he successfully avoids burning his own.
And anyhow it is waste of time, and worse, for us to cudgel our brains
to fits of entirely unnecessary inventiveness when the composer has
left his music unlabelled. We sometimes hear of children being
encouraged to give verbal or dramatic expression of their own to
instrumental music; that is not education--very much the reverse. It is
merely the expense of spirit in a waste of fancifulness, the wilful
murder of all feeling for music as such.

The feeling for music as such, that is still the one thing needful. And
by this canon, so it seems to me, we must judge all these alarums and
excursions of modern composers. If we hold firmly by it, we shall not be
unduly worried when we learn that the music which seems so perfectly to
realize the composer's expressed meaning has been originally designed by
him quite otherwise--as has happened oftener than is generally known;
though this fact does not excuse wilful contradictions of a composer's
definite intentions, as in the vulgar perversion of Rimsky-Korsakoff's
_Scheherezade_ popularized by the latest fashionable toy, the Russian
Ballet, which would do more musically unexceptionable service were it to
confine itself to works specially designed for it, such as the
fascinating and finely-wrought scores of Stravinsky, or concert works
like Balakireff's _Thamar_, based on programmes that can be mimetically
reproduced without unfaithfulness. And anyhow, in the midst of all these
appeals to the eye or the literary memory or what not, we may call to
mind the simple truth that music is something to be heard with either
the inward or the outward ear, and if we are too much distracted
otherwise, our hearing sense suffers. We shall pay too high a price for
our latter-day correlation of music with literature and the other arts
if the music itself has to play the part of Cinderella. 'We do it wrong,
being so majestical.'

Again, we may endeavour to co