It seems at first strange that, music being at once the glory and the recreation of the whole German nation, and a knowledge of it being native to the vast majority of individual Germans, there is little existing musical criticism--none as compared with the abounding German criticism on every other branch of art and every other subject under the sun. The field offered here to the cobweb-spinning German brain is wide and attractive. It seems strange that it should be as yet uncultivated, unless we fall back on the theory that art at its vitalest is of necessity uncritical, and that where an inborn love of, and aptitude for, an art exists with a daily enjoyment of its technical perfection, we shall be least likely to find it elaborately criticised theoretically. Where practice is abundantly satisfactory theories are superfluous. Below, though still in the same category with, the musical gift of the Germans we may cite the literary gift of the English. For though this may not be the greatest literary epoch of England, yet it will not be denied that the greatest of English aptitudes is for literature. The wide appreciation of it in England is unmatched by a like appreciation of any other form of art. The growth of English novel-writing and its healthy development, accompanied, it may be, by many fungus-growths due to over-fertility, afford us the spectacle of a contemporary yet spontaneous English art, unforced by hothouse cultivation, uninfluenced by theories. A century or so hence the hearty, unconscious bloom of narrative literature in our day and language may seem as strange as seems to us the spontaneous blossoming of Venetian painting, of Greek sculpture, or of architecture in the Ile de France. An Englishman of to-day who thinks painters can be spun out of theories would surely laugh with instinctive knowledge of the veritable requirements of their art if one were to propose supplying novelists or poets in a similar way. If we thus acknowledge that two kinds of art--and those two requiring the greatest amount of imaginative power--can flourish with spontaneity even in so self-conscious a civilization as ours, we shall fail to see in that civilization a sufficient _a priori_ reason why the same might not have been the case with painting. If, however, still keeping to our own day, we look for the reverse of this picture, we shall find some approach to it in the condition of the painter's art in England. Here theory runs wild, practice falls far behind, and a great part of the practice that exists is inspired and regulated by theory. Artists are especially self-conscious, and the public, while much concerned with things artistic and fed on daily food of art-theory and speculation, is specially devoid of an innate artistic sense and an educated faculty for appreciating technical perfection.