The close connection between music and poetry would indeed be more immediately apparent if people of to-day had not acquired a distorted view of poetry by reading it in silence instead of reciting it aloud. Cheap printing and popular education have given readers――poets too, perhaps――an entirely false set of values. People talk of the beauties of Greek poetry; how can they have any idea of them when the most learned scholars admit that nobody knows how classical Greek ought to be pronounced? They are in the same position as a musician of the future might be if he studied the scores of Beethoven without any idea of what a tone or a semitone was. They know what the words mean, but they are in much the same case as the man who sees nothing in a picture beyond the story which it tells. This preoccupation with the “story”, natural and inevitable as it is, has dominated the whole conception of art; it has even contaminated the conception of music. It is necessary to draw attention to it here, because it constantly distracts the attention from the fact that all the arts are in a perpetual state of change. We see the human form represented in the plastic arts and are inevitably tempted to judge them according to their skill in representing it faithfully. We read about the common experiences of human life in poetry, we accept translations from other languages without demur, and take pleasure in the sense of human continuity. The stability of material works of art gives us a false idea of æsthetic permanence; we are easily induced to take an analogous view of poetry. But in actual fact language, which is the material of poetry, is in constant flux; we are so well aware of that fact that we have almost ceased to notice it. Language changes because it is, if not the most immediate, at least the most useful, of our means of expression. The most immediate means of artistic expression is music, and consequently music is of all the arts the most subject to change, perhaps the most subtle, certainly the most transitory. IV