The self-styled music-lover in this country too often brings little more genuine comprehension to music. He is likely to be a highbrow (defined as a person educated beyond his intelligence), with all the mental obtuseness and snobbishness of his class. He divides music into “popular”--meaning light--and “classical”--meaning pretentious. Now there is good music and bad, and the composer’s pretensions have little to do with the case. Compare, for example, the first-act finale of Victor Herbert’s _Mlle. Modiste_ with such vulgar rubbish as _Donna è mobile_. Yet because the latter is sung by tenors, at the Metropolitan, the highbrow solemnly catalogues it as “classical,” abolishing the work of Herbert, Berlin, and Kern, three greatly gifted men, with the adjective “popular.” In general, he is the faithful guardian of the Puritan tradition, always sniffing the air for a definite “message” or moral, seeking sermons in tones, books in running arpeggios. It never occurs to him that just as words are the language of intellect, so is music the language of emotion, that its whole excuse for existence is its perfection in saying what lies just beyond and above words, and that if you can reduce a composer’s message to words, you automatically render it meaningless. Music criticism in America is amazingly good in the cities. The system under which the critics must work, however, whereby they are supposed to “cover” everything (in New York this theoretically entails making some sort of critical comment upon every one of three or four hundred events in a single season) is so impossible that much of their work is inevitably scamped and perfunctory. Elsewhere throughout the country criticism is handed over to reporters, who generally avoid trouble by approving of everything. There is a tendency toward the double standard--holding the stranger strictly to account, especially the foreigner, and being “nice” to the native--that produces demoralizing results. Of real musical journalism we have none. There is _The Musical Quarterly_, good of its kind, but rather ponderous and making no pretence to timeliness. The monthlies are chiefly for the teacher. The weeklies are in general frankly “shop” organs, devoted to the activities of the performer and filled with his advertisements, portraits, and press notices. There is no medium for the exchange of contemporary thought, for the discussion of topics having a non-professional cultural interest. Music publishing here is an industry, conducted like any other industry. The Continental type of publisher, who is a scholar and a musician, and a gentleman who is conscious of a duty to music as well as to the stockholders, is almost unknown here. To our publishers music is a commodity, to be bought cheap and sold dear, and most of them will publish anything that looks profitable, regardless of its quality. Their typographical standards are higher than those anywhere in the world, except Germany.