190 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
believe that all musical criticism springs from their tangled roots. And 
to this may be added a real difficulty which music specially has to 
confront. Our ordinary language has been so framed with reference 
io external nature and the life of man that the critic of literature or 
painting has a far easier task than the critic of musical style or musical 
structure. Music is equally philosophical in basis, but its philosophy is, 
in the nature of the case, if not more penetrating than that of the poet, 
a little more abstract in form. Compare, for instance, a play of Shake- 
speare with a symphony of Beethoven. ‘he comparison is really extra- 
ordinarily close; there is the same kind cf architectonic power in the 
construction ; there are the same points of interest and adventure; there 
is the same high and noble emotion; there is the same humour; there 
is even, allowing for the difference of medium, the same characterisa- 
tion. But when Mr. Bradley analyses for us a Shakespeare play, there 
ave a thousand points on which he can illustrate his meaning in words 
and phrases which directly relate his experience to human life. When 
Sir George Grove analyses a symphony of Beethoven, he is hard put to 
it to find any verbal analogues at all; when they do come they hardly 
seem more convincing than metaphors, and almost every point in his 
admirable account has to be illustrated and enforced by musical examples 
which the majority of people persistently declare themselves unable to 
read. The result is that the musical critic has often to substitute 
emphasis for persuasion, and has tended to dogmatise—not because 
he is unsure about his convictions (though this is a common basis of 
dogmatism), but because the difficulty of expressing them drives him 
to an unusual trenchancy. 
Another reason for the prevalent error is that musical history has 
been far too sharply separated from the general history of civilisation. 
This, again, is a matter of proportion; the English Histories of my 
boyhood were mainly occupied with battles and treaties, and paid very 
little attention to letters or science or discovery, but at worst they have 
nothing to show parallel to Lord Macaulay’s great History of England, 
which in an exhaustive account of the reign of James II. finds no room 
for the mention of Purcell. The result is again the loss of human 
interest, which tends to relegate music into a remote and abstract world 
which is far away from men’s business and bosoms. Professor Dowden 
once wrote a very remarkable essay about the influence of the French 
Revolution on English literature; an essay of equal interest and im- 
portance might be written about its influence on Viennese music. And 
indeed we are coming more and more to see that the whole artistic 
expression of the people is an index of its national character and a 
symptom of its national health. 
It is not, therefore, because music is unworthy of a place in our 
intellectual life that we have hitherto left it so much on one side. 
We have been frequently reminded of late—and we cannot be reminded 
too often—that the one supreme period of English musie, the period in 
which our composers stood in the forefront of the whole world, is 
the period which produced the great Elizabethan seamen and the great — 
Klizabethan dramatists; the period in which Drake circumnavigated 
the world and Shakespeare the soul of man; and, what is more, that 
