Although practical experience may force us to admit that the perpetual change to which music has been subjected during the course of centuries makes it impossible for us to arrive even after prolonged study of documents at a complete understanding of the art of the remoter past, it is nevertheless interesting to make the attempt for the sake of deepening historical knowledge. If we cannot enter into the life of our ancestors without studying their arts as well as their politics, we must certainly pay as careful an attention to their music as we do to their architecture or their painting. The historians of music have only recently begun to set forth in a tentative way the evolution of musical forms. They have paid little or no attention to the varying relations of music to the other arts and to life in general. Nor have they considered seriously the history of musical appreciation. But if we are to understand the significance of music at various periods it is obviously of interest to discover at what date music began to be regarded as an independent art――independent, that is, not merely of poetry, but also of magic, religion or ethics. And this will further lead us to the closely connected question of its varying psychological appeal. The rough division, suggested in a previous chapter, of that appeal into the three aspects, physical, emotional and intellectual, will at least serve to provide us with an experimental basis. If we find it unsatisfactory we shall at least hope to make our minds clearer as to its real nature in the process of submitting it to a historical test. There is, too, another well-known classification of artistic experience under the adjectives “Dionysiac” and “Apollinian.” The latter coincides, if I understand it aright, more or less with what I have called the “intellectual” appreciation of music; but the “Dionysiac” view of music seems to require more searching analysis. It is clear that the Dionysiac view of music must be very much the older, as well as the commoner, of the two. The remoteness of Greek art of all kinds has caused most people to regard it in a very chilly light, although modern archæology has gone some way towards correcting this view. But it is highly probable that even to the more intellectual of Greek music-lovers music (using the word in our normal sense) was more frankly a matter of physical sensation than cultivated musicians, at any rate in England, would willingly admit it to be for themselves. It was pre-eminently vocal, and as the Greeks were a Mediterranean people with a very clear and concrete outlook on life, its appeal to them might be more reasonably compared with that of opera to South Italians. To people vividly conscious of all physical things singing naturally implies intensification of the personality――including the physical personality――of the singer. This will account for Plato’s intimate conjunction of music with bodily conditions and his