s in
sympathetic resonances, primary and secondary, at which some recent
composers for the piano have, at present rather tentatively, tried their
hands. And whole-tone and duodecuple scales and modern harmony in
general are taking us farther and farther away from those natural laws
of the vibrating string upon which arm-chair theorists have sought to
build a very top-heavy edifice. Of course, the vibrating string
ultimately gives--mostly out of tune--all the notes of the chromatic
scale, but composers employ them on principles the reverse of
mathematical.

The growth of music has not been scientific; but growth of some kind is
evident enough, though it is none too easy to define it at all
adequately. Some might say, with Romain Rolland in his _Musiciens
d'autrefois_, that 'the efforts of the centuries have not advanced us a
step nearer beauty since the days of St. Gregory and Palestrina'; but
this is surely a narrow outlook. Beauty combines the many with the one:
and plain-song and the _Missa Papae Marcelli_ show us only a few, a very
few, of its manifestations. But artistic progress is, anyhow, very
subtle and evasive; and musical progress, in particular, is hardly
correctable with any other. Above all, we must recollect that, to us
Europeans, music--which, in the only sense worth our present
consideration, is an exclusively European product--is incalculably the
youngest of the great arts; if we exclude some monophonic conceptions
that have still their value for us, it is barely five hundred years old
at the most.

During the last generation an advance in material complexity is obvious,
even though the complexity may often enough be one of accidentals rather
than essentials. An orchestral score of Wagner is relatively simple in
comparison with one of Delius or Ravel or Scriabin or Stravinsky or
Schoenberg; and the demands on performers' technique and also on their
intelligence have steadily increased to heights altogether unknown
before. The composer has at his present disposal a vastly enlarged
medium; the possibilities of sound have developed incalculably more than
those of paint or stone or marble. Pheidias could, we may imagine, have
appreciated Rodin across a gulf of over two thousand years; but it is
difficult to see the points of contact, after little over three hundred
years, between Palestrina and any twentieth-century work that would
claim to be 'in the movement'. And it is not only in complexity that we
h