"'This is why the Romans, who conquered, not coloured races, but the mightiest white nations, could never write either great epics or great dramas. They wrote only one epic, one drama of first and to this day unparalleled magnitude: the Roman Empire. I meant to do a similar thing for Athens, but I failed. I now know why. My real enemies were not in the camp of my political adversaries, but in the theatre of Dionysus and in the schools of the philosophers. Do not, therefore, _ma chère amie_, begrudge the Germans their great musicians. They are really very great, and not even your greatest minds surpass, perhaps do not even equal them. Your consolation may be in this, that the Germans too will soon cease writing music worth the hearing. They now want to write quite different epics. And no nation can write two sorts of epics at a time.' "'I am so glad to hear you say so,' said Mrs Blazing. 'It relieves me of a _corvée_ that I hitherto considered to be a patriotic duty. I mean, I will henceforth never attend the representations of the new school of _soi-disant_ English music. Inwardly I never liked it; it always appeared to me like an Englishwoman who tries to imitate the _grâce_ and _verve_ of a Parisian woman, with all her easy gestures, vivacious conversation, and delicate coquetry. It will not do. "'We English women do not shine in movement; our sphere is repose. We may be troublesome, but never _troublante_. "'Even so is English academic music. And I now see why it must be so. It is not in us, because another force takes its place. Like all people we like to shine in that wherein we are most deficient, and the other day I was present at a scene that could hardly be more painful. At the house of a rich and highly distinguished city man I met the famous Sir Somebody Hangar, the composer. The question arose who was the greatest musician? Thereupon Sir Somebody, looking up to the beautiful ceiling of the room, exclaimed dreamily: "Music is of _very_ recent origin...." One of the gentlemen present then asked Sir Somebody whether he had ever heard the reply given to that question by the great Gounod? Sir Somebody contemptuously uttered: "Gounod? It is not worth hearing." I was indignant, and pointedly asked the gentleman to tell us Gounod's reply. The gentleman, looking at Sir Somebody with a curious smile, related: "'Gounod, on being asked who in his opinion was the greatest musician, said: "When I was a boy of twenty, I said: _moi_. Ten years later I said: _moi et Mozart_. Again ten years later I said: _Mozart et moi_. And now I say: _Mozart_."' "This reply," said Alcibiades, "has Attic perfume in it. Having suffered so much, as I have, at the hands of musicians in my time, when dramatic writers were as much musicians as dramatists, I have in my Olympian leisure carefully inquired into the real causes of the rise of modern music.