its faithfulness."

And yet so strange is human nature that that which we
call civilization strives unceasingly to nullify emotion.
The almost childlike faith which made our church spires
point heavenward also gave us Gothic architecture, that
emblem of frail humanity striving towards the ideal. It is
a long leap from that childlike faith to the present day of
skyscrapers. For so is the world constituted. A great truth
too often becomes gradually a truism, then a merely tolerated
and uninteresting theory; gradually it becomes obsolete
and sometimes even degenerates into a symbol of sarcasm or a
servant of utilitarianism. This we are illustrating every day
of our lives. We speak of a person's being "silly," and yet
the word comes from "saelig," old English for "blessed"; to act
"sheepishly" once had reference to divine resignation, "even
as a sheep led to the slaughter," and so on _ad infinitum_.
We build but few great cathedrals now. Our tall buildings
generally point to utilitarianism and the almighty dollar.

But in the new art, music, we have found a new domain in which
impulses have retained their freshness and warmth, in which,
to quote Goethe, "first comes the act, then the word"; first
the expression of emotion, then the theory that classifies it;
a domain in which words cannot lose their original meanings
entirely, as in speech. For in spite of the strange twistings
of ultra modern music, a simple melody still embodies the
same pathos for us that it did for our grandparents. To be
sure the poignancy of harmony in our day has been heightened
to an incredible degree. We deal in gorgeous colouring and
mighty sound masses which would have been amazing in the last
century; but still through it all we find in Haendel, Beethoven,
and Schubert, up to Wagner, the same great truths of declamation
that I have tried to explain to you.

Herbert Spencer, in an essay on "The Origin and Functions of
Music," speaks of speech as the parent of music. He says,
"utterance, which when languaged is speech, gave rise to
music." The definition is incomplete, for "languaged utterance,"
as he calls it, which is speech, is a duality, is either an
expression of emotion or a mere symbol of emotion, and as such
has gradually sunk to the level of the commonplace. As Rowbotham
points out, impassioned speech is the parent of music, while
unimpassioned speech has remained the vehicle for the smaller
emotions of life, the everyday expressi