It is at all times difficult to draw a line between religious exaltation and rhetorical pretentiousness. A consideration of the technical means of expression in music may help us to clear our minds. Since the middle of the fifteenth century music has exhibited a perpetual struggle between counterpoint and harmony, between what are sometimes called the horizontal and vertical tendencies of the art. The horizontal conception of music is, as all musicians know, the primary musical instinct to sing and to elaborate the art by the combination of voices each singing its own independently expressive line and achieving further emotional force by the ordered clash of dissonance. The vertical conception cannot really be separated entirely from the horizontal, for it has grown out of it. It derives its emotional force from the assumption of periodic stresses, and the study of harmony is therefore inseparable from that of rhythm. It is regular rhythm which gives different kinds of chords their æsthetic and the quasi-logical values. Melody represents individuality and counterpoint the interaction and conflict of individualities. Harmony represents the community as a whole under the direction of the mind which has created the music. It is therefore natural that as music comes to be associated with communal feeling on a large scale, with such ideas, for instance, as the universal brotherhood of man, it should tend to become more and more predominantly vertical in method. The ordinary music-lover can realize this from his recollections of Bach and Handel. Bach’s music is mainly horizontal in tendency. It is music for small groups of performers, seldom suited to interpretation by large bodies. Handel’s music, in which the vertical method is far more conspicuous, gains rather than loses by the multiplication of voices and instruments, and for this reason Handel is to most Englishmen the ideal composer for occasions of national ceremony. The emotional effect is intensified by the actual increase of sound and along with this by the rhythmical unanimity of the chorus or orchestra. The ordinary man seems to be curiously susceptible to emotion at the sight of several hundred people doing exactly the same thing at one moment, as in military and gymnastic displays, even though the movements executed may be not in the least interesting in themselves.