longer living) take the _adagio_ of that
symphony at a lively _allegretto_, slowing down for the warmer major
sections into the speed and manner of the heroine's death song in a
Verdi opera; and the listeners, far from relieving my excruciation by
rising with yells of fury and hurling their programs and opera glasses
at the miscreant, behaved just as they do when Richter conducts it. The
mass of imposture that thrives on this combination of ignorance with
despairing endurance is incalculable. Given a public trained from
childhood to stand anything tedious, and so saturated with school
discipline that even with the doors open and no schoolmasters to stop
them they will sit there helplessly until the end of the concert or
opera gives them leave to go home; and you will have in great capitals
hundreds of thousands of pounds spent every night in the season on
professedly artistic entertainments which have no other effect on fine
art than to exacerbate the hatred in which it is already secretly held
in England.

Fortunately, there are arts that cannot be cut off from the people by
bad performances. We can read books for ourselves; and we can play
a good deal of fine music for ourselves with the help of a pianola.
Nothing stands between us and the actual handwork of the great masters
of painting except distance; and modern photographic methods of
reproduction are in some cases quite and in many nearly as effective in
conveying the artist's message as a modern edition of Shakespear's plays
is in conveying the message that first existed in his handwriting. The
reproduction of great feats of musical execution is already on the
way: the phonograph, for all its wheezing and snarling and braying, is
steadily improving in its manners; and what with this improvement on the
one hand, and on the other that blessed selective faculty which enables
us to ignore a good deal of disagreeable noise if there is a thread
of music in the middle of it (few critics of the phonograph seem to be
conscious of the very considerable mechanical noise set up by choirs
and orchestras) we have at last reached a point at which, for example,
a person living in an English village where the church music is the only
music, and that music is made by a few well-intentioned ladies with
the help of a harmonium, can hear masses by Palestrina very passably
executed, and can thereby be led to the discovery that Jackson in F and
Hymns Ancient and Modern are not perhaps