ings, but
will grow as the experience of the pupil himself grows. As his sympathy
and insight also increase, so will his knowledge of the good and evil of
music progress. This is a vastly different process to any arbitrary
enforcement of "this is good and that is bad" standards, and indeed it
is but a poor compliment to any teacher when we find pupil after pupil a
more or less complete imitation of the same original.

One thing that is conspicuously lacking in the world to-day is the
ability to be one's self. Suggestion and habit are ever at work to kill
originality and to stifle self-reliance and initiative. Thousands can
copy, few can invent. The reason may be that only the few are able and
willing to go to the fountain-head of spirit, where there is the
infinite variety of universal thought to be their inspiration. The many
are content to live their teachers' ideas over and over again, building
their lives and abilities on quite ordinary models in a quite ordinary
way. In music we already possess far too many "dittos," ditto
programmes, ditto compositions, ditto renderings, and ditto ideals.
Praise the Lord for originality wherever it may be found. The
conventional goes round and round in a circle, like a puppy after its
own tail: but originality rises at each revolution and so reaches on and
up, in progress like a spiral. So to-day the teacher fosters
originality, shaping it with kindly criticism or helpful suggestion, but
never damning it with a fatal "don't." Education's maxim to-day is "Do;
but do better next time."

In this larger view of teaching, the technique, though not despised and
rejected, is relegated to its proper place in the scheme of things. The
cult of the head and the heart predominates, and the whole course of the
instruction is an integral part of the training for life. If it be true
that we are making "houses built without hands, for our souls to live
in," then music is determining no small part of the architecture for the
student who follows the gleam. The inspired teacher (and, without the
vision, teaching must ever be the veriest drudgery) is engaged upon one
of the noblest of tasks as well as one of the most responsible. We may
even hope that one day the world will awaken to this fact. Incidentally
teachers themselves, by thinking more nobly of their tasks, can do much
to dignify their calling. They are truly in the van of progress, and
"with the power of the Spirit almost untried and the p