Music is like a sensitive plant,--it flourishes only when each and every condition is favorable to its growth. For this reason those who find pleasure, edification, and comfort in its subtle qualities should imitate the skilled gardener in his watchful and discriminating culture of flowers. A professional gardener is to horticulture what a critic should be to art. Each is supposed to bring trained faculties to his task, but the gardener, familiar with the principles that govern flower growth, studies the natures of his germs, and then adapts soil, temperature, etc., to the requirements of each. He thus starts out with one material advantage over his art _confrère_, in that his experience enables him to recognize the genera of his germs and to anticipate results. He deals with seeds, roots, slips, and bulbs; the art critic with the mysteries of individuality, of which he most often judges from the impressions made upon his susceptibilities by a momentary contact of its outward manifestations. These manifestations are seldom full and trustworthy indexes of creative capacity, especially in the cases of young composers, because of the unfavorable conditions that so often attend upon their development and presentation. Communities are gardens in which music thrives, barely exists (the most common condition), or entirely fails to take root. Propagation is the crucial test of vitalizing qualities. A community that can produce new varieties, really audacious talents, must possess a high degree of fertility. The composers to be found living and creating in any given place are therefore reflections of their musical environment, for the faculties of musical organisms are more sensitive even than music itself. Transplanted music will continue to exist under conditions that afford no incitement to earnest creation, nor the elements from which virility may be drawn. Beethoven's works interest communities in which his faculties would have remained latent. The legitimate functions of criticism are to seek out and to nurture true talent and to guide public discrimination in its initial judgment. Critics and reviewers are experts to whose expressed opinions the printing-press imparts degrees of convincing power not always comportable with their merit, and spreads them broadcast for good or ill. Printed criticism, because of this cogent quality, and because it appeals, and may repeatedly appeal,--being in fixed form,--to so broad a radius of intelligence, should be the most powerful as well as the most active agency in creating the conditions essential to musical growth; but a careful review of the past and present relations of criticism to art culture would, to my mind, convince any unbiassed thinker that the decision of our court had been delayed and not facilitated by the average advocate, and that the productivity of our garden had never been increased by the ministrations of professional gardeners.