idly, sitting under
trees, but in the eager pursuit of its unnumbered paths. It was that
aspect of it which, as he knew so well, his father, for instance, would
never be able to understand. To Lord Ashbridge's mind, music was
vaguely connected with white waistcoats and opera glasses and large pink
carnations; he was congenitally incapable of viewing it in any other
light than a diversion, something that took place between nine and
eleven o'clock in the evening, and in smaller quantities at church on
Sunday morning. He would undoubtedly have said that Handel's Messiah was
the noblest example of music in the world, because of its subject; music
did not exist for him as a separate, definite and infinite factor of
life; and since it did not so exist for himself, he could not imagine
it existing for anybody else. That Michael correctly knew to be his
father's general demeanour towards life; he wanted everybody in their
respective spheres to be like what he was in his. They must take their
part, as he undoubtedly did, in the Creation-scheme when the British
aristocracy came into being.

A fresh factor had come into Michael's conception of music during these
last seven days. He had become aware that Germany was music. He had
naturally known before that the vast proportion of music came from
Germany, that almost all of that which meant "music" to him was of
German origin; but that was a very different affair from the conviction
now borne in on his mind that there was not only no music apart from
Germany, but that there was no Germany apart from music.

But every moment he spent in this wayside puddle of a town (for so
Baireuth seemed to an unbiased view), he became more and more aware that
music beat in the German blood even as sport beat in the blood of his
own people. During this festival week Baireuth existed only because of
that; at other times Baireuth was probably as non-existent as any dull
and minor town in the English Midlands. But, owing to the fact of music
being for these weeks resident in Baireuth, the sordid little townlet
became the capital of the huge, patient Empire. It existed just now
simply for that reason; to-night, with the curtain of the last act of
Parsifal, it had ceased to exist again. It was not that a patriotic
desire to honour one of the national heroes in the home where he had
been established by the mad genius of a Bavarian king that moved them;
it was because for the moment that Baireuth to Ger