It is now some years since a few English writers began to advocate the return to nationalism. Since then, much, no doubt, has been done, but much still remains to do, and to us hearers a great part of the reform is entrusted. We have listened to foreign tongues until our own sounds odd and unfamiliar. We have sat so long at Trimalchio’s banquet that we have no appetite left for our native fare. Extremes of passion, extremes of languor, inordinate appeals to sense, all these are alien from our national temper, and we are growing surfeited with them until our taste is spoiled and our palate vitiated. It is just the same in the world of letters. “No one reads Scott,” says one critic; “No one wants Shakespeare,” says another; “give us d’Annunzio and Sudermann and the Immoral Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.” Fortunately English ethics and English literature may be left to look after themselves; they have both a continuity of tradition which will prevent them from falling very far askew. But our art of music is being restored from the heaps of ruin into which it was laid two centuries ago, and it is the business of all who care for art or country to lend a hand. At least we might try to discover what English music has to say, and estimate our composers according to their capacity for saying it. This position is strengthened by all evidence of musical history. The same hand which made Germany a people enriched her with the “Marseillaise of the Reformation,” and so founded the long dynasty of her great composers. Art in France was at its lowest, when the chief occupation of Paris was to dispute between the claims of the Bavarian Gluck and the Italian Piccinni. Italy herself declined as she lost her national character, the Slavonic peoples have advanced as they have reasserted theirs. And what is true of nations is equally true of their leaders. “The greatest genius,” says Emerson, “is the most indebted man”; the man, that is, who can turn to the most noble and enduring use the traditions of his age and country. So it was with Haydn. Nothing can be more false than to regard him as merely a Court musician, writing with ready and facile talent the _pièces d’occasion_ that were needed for the theatre or the reception-room. His life at Eisenstadt gave him opportunity such as no composer had ever before enjoyed, but the patronage was too enlightened and the character too strong to be satisfied with work that was mannered or artificial. Under the famous “livery of blue and silver” there beat the heart of a rustic poet, full of kindliness, of drollery, of good-fellowship, of the love of children and animals. His genius, trained by years of assiduous labour, gave him a complete mastery over the inherited resources of his art, his imagination extended them with fresh discoveries and inventions. But throughout the whole his favourite themes are pastoral, songs of the shepherd and the harvester, songs of country courtship, songs of