L.—EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 189 
this is that such a sequence of notes can no more make a melody than 
a sequence of words makes a sentence. Everything depends on 
whether the words do or do not carry a meaning. Suppose, for 
instance, I wrote a sonnet of which the last line should run 
‘And purple decks the fragrant empyrean,’ 
I should have produced a sequence of quite admirable words, but 
it would not be a line of poetry. In just the same way the difference 
between a melody of Beethoven and the types of melody which once 
fell under the censure of Sir Hugh Allen is very largely that the melody 
of Beethoven has a noble meaning, and that the bad tunes of the streets 
have either an ignoble meaning or none at all. It may frankly be 
admitted that a vast proportion of what is printed and sold as music 
is far below this criterion; it is meaningless and therefore worthless. 
But if the advocates of literature or of the representative arts feel any 
inclination to despise music on this score they may be recommended, 
before pronouncing judgment, to look at home. The present generation 
of English readers has bought 130,000 copies of ‘ The Young Visiters,’ 
the last generation made the fortune of Mrs. Henry Wood, its prede- 
cessor of Martin Tupper, and so the tradition stretches back through 
T. H. Bayly, Robert Montgomery, and a whole series of false idols 
surfeited with undiscriminating incense. The state of pictorial art in 
this country may be attested by some of our print shops, many of our 
private collections, and most of our municipal galleries. Indeed, it is 
not from the poet or the artist that one usually hears this argument. 
They know too well of what slender glass their houses are built. In all 
arts alike the work which endures is the work which appeals to the 
whole nature of man, spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and of this 
there is plenty in music to give full justification to its claim, 
Here an objection may be lodged—it may be said that this is merely 
special pleading, that music would not have been neglected unless it 
had deserved neglect; and in this there is a great measure of truth. 
The case for music has been badly presented; a great many hearers 
who really understand it are no more conscious of the fact than 
M. Jourdain knew that he was talking prose, and the vast majority who 
accept it without understanding do so because they vastly overrate its 
difficulties and are repelled by some unnecessary formalities in its 
method, 
A good many treatises on music correspond not to the writings of 
literary critics, but to elementary school books on grammar; they are 
concerned with alphabets and case endings and rules of syntax. The 
reader who takes them in hand is likely to fling them aside with the same 
impatience with which Montaigne dismissed the ‘ trash-names of 
grammar ’ which learned men had assigned to ‘ the tittle-tattle of his 
-chambermaid.’ It is not that the technical terms in music are any 
worse than those in other arts and sciences; they are less aggressive 
than the botanical description of a rose, and shorter by several syllables 
than the usual designation of a chemical compound, but they somehow 
seem to have occupied more of the field. They have forced themselves 
needlessly upon our attention; they have correspondingly led people to 
