Nationality shows itself most conspicuously in song. Instrumental music is at best an artificial species. Its forms, its methods, are handed from one nation to another, and the Harvard graduate builds his symphony upon the Viennese model of Papa Haydn. But the musical idioms of a people cannot be kept out of their songs. The folk song was ignored successfully for a thousand years, but in certain happy days of the Middle Ages it wooed and won the fugue, and modern music, strong with the strength of musical science, beautiful with the beauty of spontaneous emotional utterance, was the fruit of this union. But for all time the idiom of the folk song colored the vocal art. The musical idioms imposed themselves on the scientific basis, and when a German or a Frenchman or an Italian composed a song, he composed it with a counterpoint common through all Europe, but with the melodic idiom of the songs of his own people. The Italians of to-day have not wholly forgotten the essentials of their native melody. Indeed, their composing betrays a deep self-consciousness. They see the character of their own music and try to escape it, and it is of this very act that complaint is here made. But the fundamentals of Italian melody are not entirely lost. The pages of Puccini's "Manon," "La Bohème," and "Tosca" are not completely devoid of song which is indisputably Italian. No one would ever mistake it for French or German. But it is no longer the melody of Donizetti and Bellini. That is well. The Italian masters of the beginning of this century wrote tunes for their own sake without thought of their dramatic expressiveness, and Donizetti did not hesitate to stop the entire action of his "Lucia" at one of the most critical points in order that the famous sextet might be sung. The modern Italians do not fall into that sort of error. They are striving with all their power to compose dramatically. They are striving, too, to preserve Italian music, and for this all honor should be shown them. More than that, they have shown plainly the path along which Italian music should advance. They have demonstrated beyond question that the aria, which was the central sun of the old Neapolitan system of opera, is wholly unessential. They have shown that the dialogue of the lyric drama can be carried on in a musical speech which is melodious, but not dominated by musical patterns. They have illustrated to the full the possibilities of a flexible and eloquent recitative. They have carried to a high degree of excellence the art of fitting the musical accent to the word, and the contour of the phrase to the natural inflection of the speech. This they have done, too, in the full knowledge that their art in this detail is quite lost upon the general public and appeals only to a few studious critics of their music.