These tunes, however, that have become so popular, have the three essentials of music strongly marked: they have decided rhythm, attractive melody, and harmony at times quite good. Are we to try and attract the multitude to music by muddling up or emasculating rhythm, or by eschewing melody and banishing anything that intrigues the ear, and by supplying an harmonic scheme that awakens no brain-recognition and cannot in consequence be understood? Well, the conventional suburbanite may gush over such indeterminate and invertebrate music, saying, "Yes, isn't it just too lovely," but the rough and tumble individuals who make up most of the world will plump for the "tune" every time. Give him what he wants, and then induce him to want something better, but avoid the mistake of trying to turn him into a musical vegetarian while his meat-eating appetite has no liking for the diet. The incongruity of some of the songs we hear sung is truly appalling: we find a charming maid, love for whom might honour any man yet born, singing "Less than the dust,... even less am I," and so on. Lies, all lies, even though she lie melodically with charm and with apparent conviction. We have passionate love-songs sung by guileless individuals who would be inexpressibly shocked if you explained to them the meaning of the sentiment to which they had been giving utterance. There are operatic scenas, dealing with abduction and all sorts of uncomfortable situations, and again youngsters declaim of their somewhat indecorous emotions with gusto and--let us hope--a sublime insensibility of all that they imply. They are warbling words to music, but they are not singing, for the meaning is not there. The fault, of course, lies in the traditional idea that all aspiring vocalists must learn certain things, just as that all pianists should go through a corresponding round of instrumental compositions. Why should they? Many of these classical examples that we accept as the right things to sing or play are hopelessly antiquated and out of date: they would not stand a chance as new compositions to-day. Antiquity itself is only a recommendation if we are collectors of curios. The literature of Art is far too comprehensive for anyone to study it all, we can but touch a fragment of the whole: why, then, should that fragment be determined by tradition and custom alone? Will anybody's clothes fit me: am I not likely to secure a better fit by being measured for my own? And why should not the same consideration apply to my mental outfit? It is the same desperate fear of originality and initiative, coupled with a certain unwillingness to take individual responsibility: it is the "ditto" idea again, and yet a writer has said "imitation is suicide." Let music be studied historically and in its development, by all means, this indeed is necessary: but to spend hours and hours learning to play or sing something just because "everybody does it" is the sheerest waste of