musicians of all faiths who are
interested in the great sixteenth-century masterpieces. There are also
the aristocratically Catholic composers of latter-day France, centring
round Vincent d'Indy and the _Schola Cantorum_ and looking back for
inspiration to Cesar Franck. And again, in the English communion, there
is the marked High-Church movement for the encouragement of dignified
music, a movement that has had great influence in the purification of
popular taste. And the pivot round which all this turns is the dogmatic
faith that definitely Christian expression in music is the property,
the exclusive property, of those who by temperament and conviction are
Christians. The attitude, like the conditions which have brought it
about, is, I think, new: but some of its adherents go surely too far
when they urge that those whose minds work otherwise cannot really
appreciate this music at its due worth. Cesar Franck, that simple-minded
childlike genius, once pronounced Kant's _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_
'very amusing'--a surely unique criticism--simply, it would seem,
because it was eccentric enough not to take Catholicism as a primary
postulate: I do not myself happen to have any information about Kant's
musicianship--perhaps, like too many great thinkers, he knew little
about music and cared less--but I think we may venture to say, in the
abstract, that his philosophy would have made him fairer to Franck than
Franck was to him.

And thus perhaps we may conclude that recent musical development has
kept pace with religious development in concentrating more and more on
individual sincerity, whether on the one side or the other, and
abandoning the old easy-going haphazard routine. But, in reaction from
the extreme right and the extreme left of the movement, we have also the
sincere dislikers of stark thinking, whom their opponents call by
dignified names of abuse, such as pragmatists or undenominationalists:
and here again music keeps pace with religion. It is not the old routine
again (though perhaps in practice it may at times come rather perilously
near it); it is the more or less conscious adoption of a compromise. We
can see its musical working best of all in the recent history of church
music in England; it is true that the great mass of the younger
musicians, here as in all other countries, stand outside these
developments, and look both for ideals and practice elsewhere, but the
developments have none the less been ver