"'Music is the art of poor nations and poor classes. Outside a few Jews, no great musician came from among the rich classes; and Jews are socially impoverished. I can understand the attraction of ditties nursed in the music halls. They fan one with a gentle breeze of light tones, and here and there tickle a nerve or two. But what on earth shall we do with such _plesiosauri_ as the monsters they call symphonies, in which fifty or sixty instruments go amuck in fifty different ways? The flute tries to serpentine round the bassoon in order to instil in it drops of deadly poison; the violins gallop recklessly _à la_ Mazeppa against and over the violas and 'celli, while the brass darts forth glowing bombs falling with cruelty into the finest flower-beds of oboes and harps. It is simply the hoax of the century. Would you at Athens ever have endured such a pandemonium?' "'You are quite right, _ma très charmante dame_,' I said, 'we never had such music and we should have little cared for it. Our way of making symphonies was to write epics, crowded with persons, divine and human, and with events and incidents of all colours and shades. The Continental nations have lost the epic creativeness proper, and must therefore write epics in sound. Just as your languages do not allow you to write very strictly metred poetry such as we have written without impairing the fire and glamour of poetry, and the only way left for you of imitating the severe metres of Archilochus, Alcæus or Sappho is in the form of musical canons, fugues, or other counterpointed music. It seems to me that you English have not done much by way of music epics, because, like ourselves, you were busily engaged in writing epics of quite a different kind: the epic of your Empire. The nations that have written musical epics, did do so at a time when these were the only epics they could write,--the symphony of Empire being refused them.' "'I see,' said Mrs Blazing. 'You mean to say that our Mozarts and Beethovens are Lord Chatham, Clive, Nelson and Wellington?' "'In a manner, yes. Few nations, if any, can excel both in arts and in Empire-making, and had you English been able to hold in your imperial power considerable parts of Europe, say, of France, Germany or Spain, you would never have had either Walter Scott or Byron, Shelley or Tennyson. For the efforts required to conquer and hold European territory would have taxed all your strength so severely that no resources would have been left for conquests in the realm of the arts and literature.