ller either in size or
in historical importance. The events of 1848, for example, brought
Hungarian folk-music before the world; Bohemian claims against Austria
produced the work of Smetana and Dvo[vr]ak, largely based on the general
style of their own native melodies; the Irish Question made us know the
Irish songs; and the dominating races followed those leads, at any rate
in so far as to take interest in their own traditional music, and try to
evaluate its differentiating factors. Conscious connexion between
artistic composition and folk-music has varied very much: very strong in
Russia and other Slavonic countries, it has been very weak in Italy and
France; in Germany we find all stages between the work of Brahms, where
the folk-element is very notable, and of Wolf, where it is non-existent;
in our own islands it has been very weak, but is now becoming very
strong. But, whether this connexion has been conscious or not, still,
sooner or later, all the insisters on the importance of the element of
nationality have joined hands with the enthusiasts for the folk-music of
the people. In the work of preserving the knowledge of this folk-music
England has been one of the last of all countries: even the last edition
of Grove's _Dictionary_, our standard authority, gives many pages to
Scotland and Ireland and Wales, and smuggles English folk-music into an
appendix. Only indeed in the twentieth century has anything like an
adequate study of the varied treasures of English folk-music become
possible, and we have learned enough to realize that great folk-music is
no monopoly of the races that have been either politically or socially
decentralized.

This advance of the conception of racialism has widened and intensified
music in not a few ways. It has brought to our knowledge many splendid
melodies, infinitely varied in design and emotional range, and, at their
best, inspirations that the greatest composers would have been proud to
sign. And, mixed as are the feelings with which we must contemplate the
general course of our own musical history, we can anyhow boast of some
of the finest folk-tunes in existence in these relics of the old world
on its last western fringes, in Ireland and the Hebrides. We have come
to see that this great mass of traditional music--only in part, of
course, the outpouring of sheer genius, but at its worst sincere--is,
with its appeal alike to the child and the adult, either in years or in
musical cult