It has often been said that in the eighteenth century the musician had no other function than to accompany the clatter of dishes at princely dinner-tables. Even if this were strictly true one might at least reply that in this respect the aristocracy of the eighteenth century did more for the art of music than their descendants. The music of that period may have been conventional, courtly and designed to give pleasure; but if so, its freedom from emptiness, vulgarity and triviality is astonishing. Church and State may have deliberately encouraged the “light-hearted gaiety of the Viennese” in order to distract their thoughts from the more serious problems of politics; but music in those days was at any rate still an art, not a mere commercial product. At the same time the printing presses were active. A symphony might have been composed for the entertainment of a prince, but as soon as it was printed it became accessible to audiences outside the aristocratic circle. It was an age of “sensibility”; fine feelings, sighs and tears were all the fashion. Music begins――we can see it in Couperin, in Boccherini, in Mozart too――to display the quality of refinement, a quality which in a later generation was to have a disastrous effect on the vitality of the art. IX The outstanding characteristic of the nineteenth century is its moral fervour. The religious preoccupation of Victorian England is only a small part of this age of aspiration. In most countries of Europe philosophy, science, literature, art, and social life bear witness to the ethical passion, even in the cases of the most indignant revolt against it. It dominates music from the time of Beethoven onwards; and even now it is not entirely extinct in the musical world. The spirit of the French Revolution transformed the musician from a lackey to a prophet. Mozart was cut off just as he had recorded his vision of the new age in _The Magic Flute_. Beethoven proclaims it in the _Choral Fantasia_ and illuminates it still more intensely in _Fidelio_, in the _Choral Symphony_, the _Missa Solemnis_ and the last quartets. One cannot class Beethoven with the Romantics any more than Kant or Goethe. Romanticism stood not for enlightenment but for the reaction against it. The Romantics were like men who after an earthquake return to the ruins of their city to see what they can recover from them. It was not always their own property that they recovered. The aristocrats had lost their material privilege, but they were still determined to remain a class apart. The Catholic revival, on the Continent even more than in England, was the assertion of aristocracy as a moral principle. It affected music apart from the music that was definitely liturgical because it brought about a revival of interest in Palestrina comparable to the revival of interest in Dante. The emancipation of the artist from feudal servitude encouraged him to assume something of