here is only one thing easier than a generalisation, and that is
a generalisation in the opposite direction. You can prove anything by
statistics, if you can only choose your statistics and stop when you
want to. But statistics are like automobiles. Sometimes if you hitch
yourself up with a statistic, you meet the fate of the farmer who put
his fool head in the yoke with a skittish steer.

There was a time when I could have written you an essay on the moral
effect of music, and been convinced, if not convincing. A little later,
I could have done no worse with a thesis to the effect that music is an
immoral influence. But that time is gone now, after a time spent in
gathering material from everywhichway for this book on musicians' love
affairs. For, to repeat, with a few statistics you can prove anything;
with a complete array you can usually prove nothing, or its next-door
neighbour.

The way to test any food is to observe its effects on those addicted to
it. To study the true workings of music, then, you would not count the
pulse of one of those "Oh-I'm-passionately-fond-of-music" maidens who
talk all through even dance-music. Nor would you take for your test one
of those laymen who are fond of this tune or that, because it reminds
them of the first time they heard it--"that night when Sally Perkins
sang it while I was out in the moonlit piazza hugging Kitty Gray, now
Mrs. van Van,--or was it Bessie Brown? who buried her husband two years
ago next Sunday."

These are people to whom music is as much a rarity as Nesselrode to a
newsboy.

The true place, surely, to test the effect of music is in the souls of
the people who live in it, breathe it, steep themselves in it, play
it,--and what is worse,--work it.

To the great musicians themselves, then, we have turned. What could
have been better for the purpose than to have made them parade before
us in historic mardi-gras? wearing their hearts on their sleeves, or in
their letters, their music, their lives, as they trooped forth
endlessly from the tomes of Burney, Hawkins, Fetis, Grove, Riemann, and
from their biographies and memoirs innumerable?

A motley crew they have formed, and you perhaps have been able to find
a unity, if not of purpose, at least of result, in the music they have
made, and the music that has made them. Let them pass again, only this
time as soldiers go by at a review--the second time at the
double-quick. Here they come--watch them well.

Lea