m, or "veritism," as it is
called, has brought out a rich crop of blunders. It will not do to
have a character in a story simply sing or play something; we must
have the names of composers and compositions. The genial gentleman who
enriched musical literature with arrangements of Beethoven's
symphonies for violoncello without accompaniment has since
supplemented this feat by creating a German fiddler who, when he
thinks himself unnoticed, plays a sonata for violin and contralto
voice; Professor Brander Matthews permits one of his heroines to sing
Schumann's "Warum?" and one of his heroes plays "The Moonlight
Concerto;" one of Ouida's romantic creatures spends hours at an organ
"playing the grand old masses of Mendelssohn;" in "Moths" the tenor
never wearies of singing certain "exquisite airs of Palestrina," which
recalls the fact that an indignant correspondent of a St. Louis
newspaper, protesting against the Teutonism and heaviness of an
orchestra conductor's programmes, demanded some of the "lighter" works
of "Berlioz and Palestrina."

[Sidenote: _A popular need._]

Alas! these things and the many others equally amusing which Mr. G.
Sutherland Edwards long ago catalogued in an essay on "The Literary
Maltreatment of Music" are but evidences that even cultured folk have
not yet learned to talk correctly about the art which is practised
most widely. There is a greater need than pianoforte teachers and
singing teachers, and that is a numerous company of writers and
talkers who shall teach the people how to listen to music so that it
shall not pass through their heads like a vast tonal phantasmagoria,
but provide the varied and noble delights contemplated by the
composers.

[Sidenote: _A warning against writers._]

[Sidenote: _Pedants and rhapsodists._]

Ungracious as it might appear, it may yet not be amiss, therefore, at
the very outset of an inquiry into the proper way in which to listen
to music, to utter a warning against much that is written on the art.
As a rule it will be found that writers on music are divided into two
classes, and that neither of these classes can do much good. Too often
they are either pedants or rhapsodists. This division is wholly
natural. Music has many sides and is a science as well as an art. Its
scientific side is that on which the pedant generally approaches it.
He is concerned with forms and rules, with externals, to the
forgetting of that which is inexpressibly nobler and higher.