In building a national individuality, as in building a personal individuality, there is always a period of discipleship under some older power. When the rudiments and the essentials are once thoroughly mastered, the shackles of discipleship are thrown off, and personal expression in an original way begins. This is the story of every master in every art: The younger Raphael was only Perugino junior. Beethoven's first sonatas were more completely Haydn's than the word "gewidmet" would declare. The youthful Canova was swept off his feet by the unearthing of old Greek masterpieces. Stevenson confesses frankly his early efforts to copy the mannerisms of Scott and others. Nations are only clusters of individuals, and subject to the same rules. Italy borrowed its beginnings from Byzantium; Germany and France took theirs from Italy; we, ours, from them. It was inconceivable that America should produce an autocthonous art. The race is one great mixture of more or less digested foreign elements; and it is not possible to draw a declaration of artistic, as of political, independence, and thenceforward be truly free. Centuries of differentiated environment (in all the senses of the word environment) are needed to produce a new language or a new art; and it was inevitable that American music should for long be only a more or less successful employment of European methods. And there was little possibility, according to all precedents in art history, that any striking individuality should rise suddenly to found a school based upon his own mannerism. Especially was this improbable, since we are in a large sense of English lineage. As the co-heirs, with those who remain in the British Isles, of the magnificent prose and poetry of England, it was possible for us to produce early in our own history a Hawthorne and a Poe and an Emerson and a Whitman. But we have had more hindrance than help from our heritage of English music, in which there has never been a master of the first rank, Purcell and the rest being, after all, brilliants of the lesser magnitude (with the permission of that electric Englishman, Mr. John F. Runciman). A further hindrance was the creed of the Puritan fathers of our civilization; they had a granite heart, and a suspicious eye for music. Here is a cheerful example of congregational lyricism, and a lofty inspiration for musical treatment (the hymn refers to the fate of unbaptized infants): "A crime it is! Therefore in Bliss You may not hope to dwell; But unto you I shall allow The easiest room in Hell." It was only at the end of the seventeenth century that singing by note began to supplant the "lining-out" barbarism, and to provoke such fierce opposition as this: