The multiform appeal of orchestral music bewilders even those who deliberately listen to it in an analytical frame of mind. The difficulty is complicated by the luxuriant growth, during the last hundred years, of what is called “programme-music”――music that sets out to describe or illustrate some idea that can be expressed, and often better expressed, in a literary or pictorial form. To dissect out and trace the history of all the means of emotional stimulus in such modern orchestral music as has become generally popular――such names as Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss, Elgar and Scriabin will give a sufficient idea of the category――would require a whole volume of highly technical analysis. Fortunately there are many music-lovers who have heard enough music to grasp intuitively, if vaguely, certain principles, conventions and technical methods which they are unable to describe in words. They will recognize how “picturesqueness” is achieved by the exploitation of conventional idioms: how these idioms evoke associations not merely with things outside music, but far more widely with the recollection of music of past generations as familiar to them as it was to the composer who exploits it. They will recognize conventions of sound without sense――strings of notes that perhaps once had musical value but have now become mere formulæ, rushing winds and roaring waves “full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing.” They would have learned also, one hopes, to mistrust the composers who delude their audiences, perhaps delude themselves too, with a shimmering veil of indeterminate harmonies, and to mistrust no less those who with an aggressive air of sincerity and directness assume the solemn pose of mystery and chivalry. XII