usic
for the newspapers believe, or affect to believe, that criticism is
worthless, and I shall not escape the charge of inconsistency, if,
after I have condemned the blunders of literary men, who are laymen in
music, and separated the majority of professional writers on the art
into pedants and rhapsodists, I nevertheless venture to discuss the
nature and value of musical criticism. Yet, surely, there must be a
right and wrong in this as in every other thing, and just as surely
the present structure of society, which rests on the newspaper,
invites attention to the existing relationship between musician,
critic, and public as an important element in the question How to
Listen to Music.

[Sidenote: _Relationship between musician, critic, and public._]

[Sidenote: _The need and value of conflict._]

As a condition precedent to the discussion of this new element in the
case, I lay down the proposition that the relationship between the
three factors enumerated is so intimate and so strict that the world
over they rise and fall together; which means that where the people
dwell who have reached the highest plane of excellence, there also are
to be found the highest types of the musician and critic; and that in
the degree in which the three factors, which united make up the sum
of musical activity, labor harmoniously, conscientiously, and
unselfishly, each striving to fulfil its mission, they advance music
and further themselves, each bearing off an equal share of the good
derived from the common effort. I have set the factors down in the
order which they ordinarily occupy in popular discussion and which
symbolizes their proper attitude toward each other and the highest
potency of their collaboration. In this collaboration, as in so many
others, it is conflict that brings life. Only by a surrender of their
functions, one to the other, could the three apparently dissonant yet
essentially harmonious factors be brought into a state of complacency;
but such complacency would mean stagnation. If the published judgment
on compositions and performances could always be that of the
exploiting musicians, that class, at least, would read the newspapers
with fewer heart-burnings; if the critics had a common mind and it
were followed in concert-room and opera-house, they, as well as the
musicians, would have need of fewer words of displacency and more of
approbation; if, finally, it were to be brought to pass that for the
public nothi