An important point has been overlooked by those who have watched painting and music develop during the past century: while painting has become less and less an attempt to represent nature, music has more and more attempted concrete representation. There has seemed, at times, to be an interchange in progress in the values of the arts. (“He [Cézanne] is the first of the great painters to treat colour deliberately as music; he tests all its harmonic resources,” Romain Rolland.) Observers of matters æsthetic have frequently told us that both of these arts were breaking with their old principles and going on to something new but, it would seem, they have failed to grasp the significance of the change. Music, as it drops its classic outline and form, the _cliché_ of the studio and the academy, becomes more and more like nature, because natural sounds are not co-ordinated into symphonies with working-out sections and codas, first and second subjects, etc., while in painting, in some of its later manifestations, the resemblance to things seen has entirely disappeared. This fact, at least one phase of it, was realized in concrete form by the futurists in Italy who asserted that polyphony, fugue, etc., were contraptions of a bygone age when the stage-coach was in vogue. Machinery has changed the world. We are living in a dynasty of dynamics. A certain number of futurists even give concerts of noise machines in which a definite attempt is made to imitate the sounds of automobiles, aeroplanes, etc. At a concert given at the Dal Verme in Milan, for example, the pieces were called _The Awakening of a Great City_, _A Dinner on the Kursaal Terrace_ (doubtless with an imitation of the guests eating soup), and _A Meet of Automobiles and Aeroplanes_. Picasso and Picabia have made us acquainted with a form of art which in its vague realization of representative values becomes almost as abstract an art as music was in the time of Beethoven, while such musicians as Strauss, Debussy, and Strawinsky, have gradually widened the boundaries which have confined music, and have made it at times something very concrete. Debussy’s _La Mer_, for example, is a much more definite picture (in leaning over the rail of the gallery of the Salle Gaveau in Paris during a performance of this piece I actually became sea-sick!) than Marcel Duchamp’s painting of the _Nu Descendant l’Escalier_. So Strawinsky’s three pieces for string quartet represent certain things in nature (the first a group of peasants playing strange instruments on the steppes; the second sounds in a Cathedral heard by a drowsy worshipper, the responses of the priest, chanted out of key, the shrill antiphonal choruses; and the third a juggling Pierrot with a soul-pain) much more definitely than Picasso’s latest _Nature Morte dans un Jardin_.