music was, at its highest, something better than an
entertainment, however thrilling or however refined.

But, whatever critics and composers may feel about musical progress, it
is, as Wagner said, in the home of the amateur that music is really kept
alive, and the amateur's music depends very largely on the schools. A
generation ago music was certainly sociologically selfish. Musicians had
not realized that all classes of the community were open to the
influences of fine music, if only they had the opportunities for
knowing it. But since then there have been very great advances, both
quantitative and qualitative, in musical education. We have spread it
broadcast, in the increasing faith that appreciation depends, not on
technical knowledge or executive skill, but on the responsive
temperament and the will to understand. Familiarity, familiarity at home
if possible, is the key to this understanding; and in this connexion
there is, I believe, an enormous educational future before pianolas and
gramophones, if only the preparation of their records can be taken in
hand on artistic rather than narrowly commercial lines. And our
standards of judgement have risen: we do not worship quite so blindly
mere names, whether of the past or of the present, nor exalt the
performer quite so dizzily above what is performed. Nor do we quite so
glibly disguise our indifference to vital distinctions by talking about
differences of taste: we know that, however catholic we may rightly be
within the limits of the good, whether grave or gay, there comes sooner
or later, in our judgement of musical as of all other spiritual values,
a point where we must put our foot down. We are going on, and our
theories are sound enough: but the path of a democratically widened, and
rightly so widened, art is by no means easy. The principle of levelling
up slides so readily into the practice of levelling down: and the book
of music is closed once for all if we are to accept the plenary
inspiration of majorities.

But here in England the greatest danger to musical progress is, I
venture to think, the self-styled practical Englishman--fortified as he
is by the consciousness that, for at any rate a couple of centuries or
more, we have as a nation taken a low view of the arts and have been
rather proud of it than otherwise. It is so obvious that no profession
is economically more unsound than that of the serious composer: it is
not so obvious that we owe all the