Will the music of such a world differ from the music of to-day? Necessarily, since life without change is inconceivable to us and music that is alive must be changing. But the meaning of this change is not to be apprehended by the mind, for it is no less than life itself. A part of it, however, can be apprehended, for, although we feel instinctively that the more the world changes the more that it is the same[8] yet we cannot deny that it is the same with a difference. And it is the difference which matters and is _matter_--that which appears, is visible and audible--_the death-shape of the spirit_. It would be boring and futile to consider the methods which may be invented of distributing music or of making music heard. That a million persons listen to Beethoven by wireless or gramophone where, previously, a thousand listened in a concert hall is one of those statistical changes which it is beyond the wit of man to value. Fortunately there is a period fixed to the possibilities of “progress” of this kind; and when every baby is born to Beethoven and to Freedom then culture and statistics of culture, education and measurements of education will have simultaneously ceased. There will be in those days no newspaper interviews with Neo-Edisons because there will be no newspapers; the people will have forgotten that it is interesting to know whether a celebrity drinks de-caffeined coffee or dehydrogened water because there will be no “people” and no celebrities. The Age of Vulgarity will have passed. What sort of music will be listened to in those days? The music of Orpheus, the music that comes out of darkness. According to Plato when Orpheus descended into hell and succeeded by the strains of his mysterious music in softening the hearts of Pluto and Persephone--who themselves were phantoms, prisoners of the imagination, supernal beings chained to the bottom of Hades because they were imagined there and existed only in _Imagination_--he brought back with him but an Apparition. It was an Apparition that he gazed at so fondly, and which nevertheless vanished before his eyes. His music was that Apparition; those heavenly strains, mysterious, profound, issuing from his mouth took form, the form of _Eurydice_--the imagination of light in darkness, of love in the midst of death. The forms that music will take in the future are as yet unimagined; but these forms will always be the form of Eurydice plucked by Orpheus vainly out of Hell. And they will not be abstract forms but the apparition of a real love which, bitten by the serpent of life, descended into the kingdom of Pluto. FOOTNOTES: [8] The evolutionary theory will no longer be thought of as a continuous or a discontinuous ascent; biological species will be regarded as ripples on a pool; the Astronomical Universe will be conceived as stationary. THE END