The scherzo, however, must grow in favor. It is impossible that the most jocose of races, a nation that has given the world an original school of humor, should not carry this spirit over into its music. And yet almost none of the comparatively few scherzos that have been written here have had any sense of the hilarious jollity that makes Beethoven's wit side-shaking. They have been rather of the Chopinesque sort, mere fantasy. To the composers deserving this generalization I recall only two important exceptions, Edgar S. Kelley and Harvey Worthington Loomis. The opportunities before the American composer are enormous, and only half appreciated. Whereas, in other arts, the text-book claims only to be a chronicle of what has been done before, in music the text-book is set up as the very gospel and decalogue of the art. The theorists have so thoroughly mapped out the legitimate resources of the composer, and have so prescribed his course in nearly every possible position, that music is made almost more of a mathematical problem than the free expression of emotions and aesthetics. "Correct" music has now hardly more liberty than Egyptian sculpture or Byzantine painting once had. Certain dissonances are permitted, and certain others, no more dissonant, forbidden, quite arbitrarily, or on hair-splitting theories. It is as if one should write down in a book a number of charts, giving every scheme of color and every juxtaposition of values permissible to a painter. The music of certain Oriental nations, in which the religious orders are the art censors, has stuck fast in its rut because of the observance of rules purely arbitrary. Many of the conventions of modern European music are no more scientific or original or consistent; most of them are based upon the principle that the whim of a great dead composer is worthy to be the law of any living composer. These Blue Laws of music are constantly assailed surreptitiously and in detail; and yet they are too little attacked as a whole. But music should be a democracy and not an aristocracy, or, still less, a hierarchy. There is a great opportunity for America to carry its political principles into this youngest of the arts. It is a gratifying sign that one of the most prominent theorists of the time, an American scholar, A.J. Goodrich, is adopting some such attitude toward music. He carries dogma to the minimum, and accepts success in the individual instance as sufficient authority for overstepping any general principle. He refers to a contemporary American composer for authority and example of some successful unconventionality with the same respect with which he would quote a European's disregard of convention. His pioneering is watched with interest abroad as well as here.