But men, having comparatively little leisure, cannot be expected to waste it on sentimental music or on mere virtuosity. A violinist who plays sweet little pieces, or who astonishes you by his technical skill, should expect no response from human beings who are at work day by day and hour by hour facing the hard facts of life. Men, dealing with exact laws or under the necessities of trade and barter, are forced to distinguish between true and false, between reality and unreality, for their very existence depends on so doing. I do not mean by this that these common experiences of men fit them to understand great music, but I think men possess thereby a certain sense of values and a certain discrimination between what is real and what is false, and that a great piece of real music will find an answer in them. I believe that the opera has much to do with the average man’s attitude toward music. To spend from three to four hours in an overheated and badly ventilated opera house after a day of business, and to listen to the sort of hectic emotionalism which is common in opera is enough to disgust the average business man with all music. How patient he is! But Beethoven, who loved and hated, and suffered and triumphed, we can all understand. When we come to listen to the opening of his violin concerto, for example, we must all say: Here is a man. And when we have compassed the whole of that great composition we shall learn to say: Here is reality _turned true at last_. We shall then have learned one of the great lessons that art teaches--namely, that there is nothing in the world so heroic, so noble, or so profound but that its qualities may be _increased_ by the imagination and the skill of the great artist. For however profound a human emotion may be or however noble a deed, it becomes more profound or more noble when it is seen in relation to the whole of life and over a stretch of time. The artist gives it true perspective, and enables us really so to see it. Dante the poet is greater than Dante the lover.